


The Kids Aren't Alright

by Sam_Ichijouji



Category: Digimon - All Media Types, Digimon Adventure
Genre: F/M, M/M, Minor Original Character(s), Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-15 17:14:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 41
Words: 80,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28942038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sam_Ichijouji/pseuds/Sam_Ichijouji
Summary: Hikari gets a text from Daisuke out of the blue which sets in motion a sequence of events which will drag her to the edge of destruction. Set nine years after '02, the chosen children are not as close as they once were, but why? [Not canon with TRI or CD dramas] [Small Tamers crossover] [Originally posted on fanfiction.net and Facebook]
Kudos: 1





	1. Shimmer

I walked down the street; cold and alone.  
I didn’t want to be here, there were too many memories, memories that reminded me of a past so close, yet so, so far away. Walking through Hikarigaoka again I remembered that night, the night which had brought about my destiny, and the destiny of the other seven. The images flashed through my brain as I walked under that bridge, that bridge that I had watched them rebuild after that fateful night, that night that no one could explain.  
I shook the memory from my head. I didn’t want to remember what that night had led to, the wonders and perils of the years to come, and most importantly, I didn’t want to remember how it had ended.  
I told myself I was stupid for coming down here, because I knew I would feel this way. I knew I would remember what I had tried so hard to forget.  
I knew the reason I was here. It was him. It was always him. The one guy I once would have most liked to disappear off the face of the Earth, had, and now after almost three full years of me trying to find some purpose in my life, he has to come back into it and remind me that we’d already fulfilled it.  
The apartment he’d rented was in the same block as the one in which I had spent my childhood, the same one in which I’d escaped from that fateful night all those years ago.  
Back then I was so scared, so nervous, so cute; I could barely talk but I still remembered that night for many a year to come. And now, even as I tried to repress it, I remembered what I found in my father’s computer the night before, and the way he had come home drunk from work on that night, just as I was escaping off the balcony, whilst my brother held the door closed so that father wouldn’t find out our not so little secret.  
But here I was, back in the same building, gradually approaching a door that I knew would look so familiar and yet so foreign to me and I started wondering if this was what I really wanted and whether I should back out. I tried to reason with myself. I knew what would be behind the door. I would find him and we would talk about what we needed to talk about, about where he’d been for the past three years, about why he was back. He would try and win me over, like he always had, and I would politely rebuff his attempts, like I always had. We’d talk about the past, sure, and those memories I had been trying to reject ever since would surface, but if I talked about it with him, maybe I wouldn’t feel so bad about having to leave it all behind.  
At least that was what I told myself anyway.  
It wasn’t as if I hated the guy, but he really could be quite annoying when it came to his lust for a bit of his idol’s sister. I guess it had been nice though, having someone around who wanted you around them. As much as I hate to admit, I had enjoyed the attention.  
I closed in on the address he’d given me in his text message. A text message. How could I have come all this way, knowing it would be so hard not to relive all that I wanted to forget about, just because a guy had given me a text message? I couldn’t believe it, and for a second time I considered turning back, leaving him to face whatever trouble he was in on his own and stay the hell out of his life. But as soon as I heard the familiar chords of Wada Kouji pulsing through the walls of his apartment, I knew it would all be fine, it would all go as I expected and we would be friends again like we had been through Junior, Middle, and Senior School.  
The song was “Target” and I knew it well, it was all over the radio in 2002, around about the time when he realised he had some competition, around about the time it all happened for a third time. I pushed open the unlocked door, I had half expected to see him waiting at the window like a faithful little puppy, but maybe he thought that if he’d waited three years to see me, he could wait a minute more.  
“Daisuke,” I called, as I removed my shoes, trying to make my voice heard over the speakers, “I’m here, where are you?”  
Of course, being a small Japanese style apartment, I didn’t have far to look. I checked the bedroom that the music was coming from first. It almost surprised me that he could sleep through the racket that was coming from the speakers not metres from his head, but then I remembered he was pretty much the same as my brother, and that meant he could sleep through anything.  
I walked towards the bed, trying to glimpse his friendly face underneath his wayward arm, and gave him a little nudge. Nothing.  
“Oh Daisuke, you really are just like my brother,” I said softly and I smiled at his naiveté in thinking I would ever end up with someone who was almost a clone of Taichi. Deep down I love my brother, but obviously not in that way.  
Wada had moved on to “Butterfly” now, but he really was starting to give me a headache so I went and shut him off halfway through his ‘Woah’ section.  
As soon as I turned the sound system off and turned towards the sleeping man I noticed two things very quickly. The first was the complete lack of snoring, which, if he really was a clone of my brother, would most certainly be a defect in the design. The second was the large black knife handle sticking out of his back.


	2. The World Has Turned And Left Me Here

It had taken much longer than I anticipated for the police to arrive, especially considering there was a station on the street, and I spent the time trying to figure out who to call.  
Taichi was my first thought, he was my brother after all, and would surely know exactly what to say to calm my nerves. But I thought better of it. He was dealing with his own problems right now. He wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but he did still love his childhood sweetheart, Sora. She was on tour with his best friend Yamato, the rock star. When Sora and Yamato, or Sorato as we used to call them behind their backs, had still been at school and in the same classes as Taichi, it had been a bit awkward for him, but then they had broken up and Taichi had somehow managed to convince Sora to give him a shot. It had been okay for a while, but they left each other amicably. Yamato and Taichi were still friends and Sora still hung out with them all the time and we all thought it was all in the past. That was until Sorato started back up again in the autumn of last year.  
Now that they were in America with Yamato’s band, Taichi couldn’t third wheel like he had been, and I think the realisation that they were so serious about each other even after everything that had happened, was the real reason for his emulation of his father’s relationship with the bottle.  
I couldn’t call Sora or Yamato either, I realised, because my phone company would probably charge me over a thousand yen per minute for an overseas call. The same went for Mimi, who had moved there so long ago that I scarcely remember having a conversation with her since the day it all ended.  
I couldn’t call Ken and Miyako, at least not right at this moment, for the same reason I couldn’t call Taichi; they both had way too much on their plate to carry the burden of the ‘first call’; what with the baby coming and all. She was eight months in, and Ken was working night and day to provide for the new addition to the Ichijouji family. I didn’t want to bother him, but out of everyone he was the one I should really be telling. However he probably wouldn’t be in the best mood to comfort me when I told him. Knowing Ken, he would probably be in a much worse state than me. He and Daisuke had been partners after all.  
I probably should have called Jun, Daisuke’s sister, but since Daisuke had left none of us really had reason to be around her. I checked my phone but I didn’t have her number. I’d never really known their parents, and I didn’t have their home number either. I did know that they probably wouldn’t care; I had it on a reliable source that they had practically said good riddance when he’d disappeared.  
Jou was finally in his last year of medical school. The problem was that this meant he was studying for finals, and had been for the past month. He was much older than me but we kept in touch more than the others would probably realise. He was very empathetic and when I had been dealing with all the Takeru business, he had proven a much wiser confidant than my brother. In deference to that service I really couldn’t call him this close to his final exam and disrupt his preparation.  
Obviously, calling Takeru was out of the question, and I only considered his name briefly as I scrolled through my contacts.  
Why couldn’t I find anyone in here to talk to? Was I really that alone that I couldn’t find a shoulder to cry on? Ichiro wouldn’t understand, he wasn’t one of us, and despite our relationship I still hadn’t told him why I was so empty inside. He had asked, but when I avoided it he let it go. He understood that I didn’t want to talk about it and didn’t begrudge me my one secret. He didn’t know about Daisuke and I either, so I guess it was actually two secrets. I hadn’t told him everything about Takeru either, so that made it three.  
I hovered over his name in my contacts list. How was I going to explain to him about this? It would come out eventually, there was no point trying to hide a murder investigation from him, but the questions I knew he would ask I wasn’t ready to answer. Not yet anyway.  
I looked at the bedroom door; behind it was which I knew all too well. It was closed but I knew that from here I would just be able to make out the perpetually spiked maroon of Daisuke’s hair, had the door still been open. Thank god he had managed to grow out of the goggle wearing stage in his life, or I think I may just have completely lost it. I pictured the knife again and how I had managed to go right up to him, so close that I could, and did, touch him, without noticing it sticking out so prominently. I couldn’t even remember if he had felt cold to the touch when I tried to wake him.  
How could I miss it? A big freaking handle hovering in mid-air behind the man I had last seen while he was still a boy and I hadn’t even seen the thing.  
I looked back down at my phone to shake the image from my head and saw another name I hadn’t considered yet: Iori. I looked back at the door, thinking I’d probably get more empathy from what I knew lay behind it, than Iori. It wasn’t that he was emotionless, far from it in fact, it was just that he preferred to keep those things bottled up.  
I went through the names in my head again. I’d crossed off nine of the other cursed few, ten if I counted the one behind the door not ten metres away from my position at the kitchen table. We had been twelve, eight originals, and then the four additions three years later. It must have been one of the original group. I scrolled down again. ‘...i, u, e, o,’ I thought to myself as I went,‘ka, ki, ku, ke, Koushiro!’ How could I forget the guy I travelled through India and China with during that fateful Christmas nine years ago? Out of everyone he was clearly the best person to call. He knew about the history, he was a good friend, and he wasn’t dealing with anything at this particular moment.  
He didn’t have a girlfriend so no surprise pregnancy, he wasn’t a rock star (I almost smiled as I thought about it, but then I remembered where I was and why I wanted to call him and I frowned at myself instead), or neck deep in exams. He still lived with his adoptive parents who had only moved to the other side of the bridge, not the other side of the world, so no international phone call; he didn’t drink and could actually, you know, talk to people without long dramatic pauses. Oh and he wasn’t a complete douche.  
Something made me hesitate though, I wasn’t quite sure why but my finger hovered over the send button for a fraction longer than it should have, sure enough that fraction became top heavy and it became much longer than it should have.  
Twelve of us from Japan and in my time of need I can only call one of them. It really was pathetic. After all we’d achieved, after all that time spent away from the real world together, I had one friend left to depend on.  
Time to call.


	3. What's Up

“Daisuke is dead.” I simply said.  
We sat in silence for a bit. We, the four warriors of a bygone time, were all that remained of what we had once considered a tight knit group.  
Koushiro: The Computer Nerd.  
Miyako: The Pregnant Chick.  
Iori: The Quiet One.  
And me: The Shadow-Of-Her-Former-Self; all sitting around Miyako’s living room, everyone drinking tea besides Iori who had managed to find some prune juice in Miyako’s fridge.  
I hadn’t brought myself to call Koushiro that night due to the police finally turning up as I begun to place pressure on the call button. I gave them my statement, showed them the text and still couldn’t come up with an adequate reason for not seeing the knife whilst trying to wake him. I think I said something about the mind seeing what it expected to see and I left it at that.  
They suggested that I call a relative to pick me up, and I had realised in all my dithering that I hadn’t even considered calling my mother. Slightly ashamed, I had finally broken down on the car trip home, only to have my tears stemmed in anger when I found that Taichi was back in the house, and he was still drinking from his stash.  
I didn’t even tell him what had happened.  
I did however send an email to Mimi and Sorato, before calling the rest, minus Jou and Takeru, and asking if we could all meet at Miyako’s tomorrow. They all must have known something was up by my tone, but I didn’t let on, they needed to hear this face to face, not over the phone.  
Ken couldn’t get off work at such short notice, and Taichi was still snoring his head off when I left at midday.  
I showed the three of them the text and recounted the previous night, leaving out nothing except the details of my hesitation in calling them, mainly because I knew Iori would be particularly displeased with my feelings towards him, but also because I didn’t want to admit that out of everyone, Koushiro was the one I would have called.  
After I had finished and everyone had gotten over the shock, Koushiro beat Miyako to asking me if I was alright. I wasn’t, but I couldn’t say that.  
“Just a little shaken up, is all,”  
“Don’t you lie to me Hikari Yagami, I know you too well,” It was Miyako, she may not have stood up and adopted her usual accusatory pose, but her eyes were blazing like she could see straight through me, which she could. Her face softened in self-satisfaction and she dropped her line of questioning, “Have you told Ichiro?”  
I looked away from her as I answered in the negative. I could feel her eyes switch back up to full force solar radiation.  
“You have to tell him, Hikari. Honesty is the pillar of a good relationship,”  
Coming from a girl who managed to get knocked up a month after she officially started dating Ken, after having a major crush on him even before she met him, I couldn’t help but feel a little annoyed that she was the resident expert on relationships.  
“Well it’s not like I can say to him that I went to have dinner with an old friend I hadn’t seen in three years based off one text message I’d received only that afternoon.”  
“Uh, yes you can, because it would explain the fact that you found his body and why the police have told you not to leave town,”  
“But he wouldn’t understand, we’d had a bit of a disagreement, and he just… he just wouldn’t…”  
“So why did you go?” It was Koushiro, changing the subject. I silently thanked him for it and I’m sure Iori did too.  
“I had questions, they needed answering,” I stated matter-of-factly, “Wouldn’t you have had questions if you’d been the one he contacted?”  
“I wouldn’t have gone over there that night though,” said Koushiro offhandedly, “You could have called him if all you wanted was to ask him questions,”  
“Are you here to comfort me or put me on trial?” I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t thought about calling him back. I preferred not to think about it.  
“We’re here because you asked us,” said Iori, the first time he’d really joined in the conversation.  
“Not me, I’m here because going somewhere else would’ve taken too much effort,” said Miyako, “Of course we’re here for you, like Iori said, we’re here because you asked us to be,”  
“But we aren’t here to comfort you,” I was surprised at Iori’s frankness. “How could you not tell us Daisuke was, you know... why couldn’t you tell us last night?”  
“I was…” I changed my mind, “that is, I thought, it would be better to tell you face to face, and I didn’t want to have to have the same conversation five times over,”  
“Why didn’t you invite Takeru?”  
I almost dropped my teacup.  
“Iori!” hissed Miyako.  
“He has a right to know, Hikari, he knew Daisuke just as well as everyone here, no matter what he’s done since,”  
“You can’t say that,” I said weakly.  
“But you just complained that you couldn’t tell Ichiro because he didn’t know about everything and now you’re saying you can’t tell someone who does?”  
Koushiro gave Iori a warning but I barely heard him; I was too busy staring at the little quiet boy who was asking me questions that even I would not dare ask myself.  
“I know exactly why you can’t tell Ichiro, it’s the same reason you couldn’t call Daisuke to ask your questions, and it all stems from the reason you can’t talk to Takeru. You have got to stop blaming him for what happened three years ago. He couldn’t have known what was going to happen.”  
There wasn’t much I could say to that so I mumbled a thank-you to Miyako for her hospitality and stood up to leave.  
How could he say that? Did he not know what Takeru had done, did he not realise how completely Takeru had destroyed everything we had worked for time and time again, had he forgotten my, his, everyone’s sacrifices?  
He didn’t know how I had felt, how I still felt, about that day three years ago. How I had been almost ready, ready to give in and finally make a choice, and give in to those feelings I’d had ever since the summer it had all happened again, as childish and innocent as they had been at the time.  
I had been ready to give my light to his hope, and then he went and destroyed it all. Everything I now wished to forget was destroyed in that one night and it had all been because of that stupid, idiotic Takeru.  
And as for what happened later, well that pretty much ruined any chance of forgiving him.  
I made it out of the door before it all came rushing back; the times spent in a world that was ours, and ours alone to enter. I remembered all the friends we’d fought to protect, the friends we’d all made for life that were gone. We’d done so much, and then it was all just gone, like it had never existed. And it had all been so simple, so easy for the gate to open, so easy for it to go unnoticed, so easy for the information to fall into the wrong hands.  
I sat down and let it all out, I remembered what my Gato’ had done, all the battles fought, all the pain she had suffered before she met me, all the pain she had suffered to be with me, and then the final sacrifice that she, that they all had made, and stopped the suffering forever. And I cried. I cried like it had happened yesterday, I cried because I knew that what Takeru had hoped to achieve, could have been done verbally in one sentence. I cried because Iori had sided with him, and I cried because Iori was right.  
I cried because I realised I wasn’t crying over the death of a friend but my own messed up life. I cried because Ichiro wouldn’t understand. I cried because I was sitting alone outside my pregnant friend’s apartment while she was tearing shreds off the person who had sent me out here.  
I cried because it was Koushiro who had come out to comfort me, and I didn’t want to talk.  
I cried because out of everyone, out of the twelve of us who supposedly understood each other so well, he was the only one left I could count on.


	4. I Think I Lost My Headache

By the time Koushiro had driven me home, I had calmed down enough to completely ignore any of his attempts at conversation.  
I couldn’t believe I’d broken down like that; was I really that insecure?  
The answer was, of course, a big fat ‘Yes, obviously,’ but I tried to convince myself otherwise. I told myself I was under a lot of stress, and all of that had just been an overreaction because of it. I mean, I had just found a long lost friend with a knife in his back.  
“Are you going to be okay?” asked Koushiro sincerely. I had to admit he pulled sincerity off better than ‘Princess Mimi’ ever did, but then again, I hadn’t seen her much since her move to America, even with everything that was going on in that year that we thought it had all ended.  
I bowed slightly, and opened up the door only to be assaulted by a mass of gravity-defying hair and a pair of eyes sporting the same look I’d seen in Miyako’s earlier.  
“How could you?” my brother spat as he grabbed me by the neck of my coat and pulled me closer so that I could feel the full force of his gaze, “How could you not tell me?”  
“Taichi, wait-” Koushiro tried to intervene before I cut him off. I was not going to break down again. It was time to get on the front foot. No more Miss Nice Yagami.  
“How could I not tell you? I’ll tell you how: for the past month since Sora and Yamato left you’ve been in danger of having no blood left in your alcohol stream. If I’d told you last night, there was no way of knowing what you would’ve done. You could’ve killed yourself if you found out, or you could’ve got mad before I’d even mentioned he was dead, and tried to beat me like last week.”  
"Please, I raised my hand, I was never going to hit you, not then anyway,"  
“I’m going to leave you two to sort this out,” Koushiro interjected. So much for him being the only one left I could count on.  
Taichi’s eyes were still blazing, and I’m sure mine were more than matching them for intensity. Without taking his eyes or hands off me he stopped him.  
“No, you’re the only one stopping me from doing exactly what she thinks I’m capable of, so stay put,”  
"You know what? That isn’t even what I was afraid of. I was afraid you would be so upset that you would drink even more. I could handle it if you were dead,” I lied, but it made my point, “but the thought of you lying in a gutter somewhere too sloshed to even remember why you started in the first place would be too much, because then our mother would be worried sick, and I’d have to go out and find you and bring you home while you hit on me because the only thing you can see is whether or not the person you are talking to has tits or not!”  
“My God, Hikari, that was one time!”  
“I really don’t need to hear this, isn’t your mother home? Maybe she could come out and mediate so I don’t need to go into therapy,”  
“Shut up Koushiro,” we both said at the same time, but Taichi was the first to strike back.  
“Hikari, you can’t just dismiss my entire existence because I’ve had a bit to drink over the past week-“  
“Month, Taichi, you’ve been drinking too much for a month,”  
“-and you can’t just get everyone together behind my back and not expect me to be pissed!”  
“Oh, I fully expected you to be pissed,”  
“Okay that’s enough, both of you inside now!”  
I don’t think I’d ever heard Koushiro speak that forcefully before. It stunned Taichi too, because he broke eye contact and let go of me.  
“In!” Koushiro insisted. We obeyed. Koushiro and I awkwardly removed our shoes as Taichi went and found some watermelon in the fridge. Koushiro motioned toward the dinner table and told us to sit, which we did.  
He took a few deep breaths before he continued.  
“Now I’m not going to pretend I know everything about your intricate relationship, but I think I’ve known you long enough and I’ve certainly heard enough out there to make a couple of judgements.” I went for a piece of watermelon, but Taichi pulled it away. Koushiro continued unperturbed.  
“Taichi, I think Hikari has probably said all that needs to be said when it comes to your issues, the only thing I could add is that the Taichi I grew up with would have moved multiple worlds to make sure his sister was okay.  
“That doesn’t mean she shouldn’t have told you about Daisuke, and neither of you should have lashed out at each other like that.  
“Now, if you two can put aside everything for a minute, can we talk about the elephant in the room?”  
I looked to Taichi, and he looked to me. We were both much calmer than before, thanks to Koushiro’s outburst shocking us into submission, but neither of us could figure out what was apparently so obvious to him.  
“What elephant?” I asked.  
“Daisuke is dead. You, Hikari, you found the body. You called some of the group together to talk about it, yet ever since, have been arguing with Iori, and now Taichi about completely irrelevant topics,”  
“What would you have to argue with Iori about?” Taichi asked me. I didn’t answer.  
“That’s not the point; the point is that no one seems to care that Daisuke is dead. No one seems to care that someone ended his life forcefully, on the very day he decides to bring himself back into Hikari’s life, and maybe even everyone’s life if he’d been given the chance to. And, why, after three years away, did he decide to make contact in the first place?”  
“Well, maybe he missed me...” I knew it was stupid as soon as it left my mouth, but hadn’t that been my impression when I’d gotten his text? Hadn’t that been one of the reasons I’d been so happy to go meet him at such short notice? Hadn’t that thought been cemented in my mind all the way up to the moment I saw the handle in his back?  
“But weren’t you the reason he left in the first place?” asked Taichi innocently. I felt like slapping him for his idiocy.  
“We, all know what happened the day we realised he’d left,” interrupted Koushiro, before I could snap at my brother again, “but I wouldn’t say the discussion you two had the day before was what made him leave, you can’t just disappear on a whim, it takes planning and foresight,”  
“Have you ever met Daisuke? He was so bull-headed he probably did vanish like it was nothing, just because you say it can’t be done,” said Taichi, lost in his own little reverie. I imagined the arc of my arm and the smack of palm on cheek.  
“My point was that Hikari probably just made it easier for him to go, rather than actually being the reason he left, he was probably just there to say goodbye...” he trailed off obviously thinking he’d said too much. Come to think of it, though it pained me to do so, Daisuke hadn’t said goodbye, he’d just said that he was happy for me and left it at that. There might just be something to what Koushiro was getting at.  
“So if he didn’t leave because of me then why?”  
“The only person who can answer that is sitting in cold storage,”  
Taichi didn’t even see the slap coming.


	5. Breaking The Girl

“You know I never thought he was right for you,”  
“What gives you the right to say that, Koushiro?”  
I was on the way to Ichiro’s after accepting that Taichi and I probably needed some time apart, mainly so he could sober up and I could cool down a bit. Koushiro was taking me because it was on the way to the apartment where he still lived with his adoptive parents. I hadn’t heard anything in the wind about a girlfriend, or otherwise, and to be honest I kind of thought he must be one of those people who didn’t care about relationships that much.  
“I don’t know, I’ve known you for twelve years, the first three of which we were out fighting monsters and stuff, and after that I’ve probably been over to your house more often than everyone except maybe Sorato but you know, I think they both realised hanging out with him wasn’t really helping things,”  
“But what do you know about Ichiro, and how do you know what I need in a guy?”  
“I’m just saying, the two guys who chased you for so long suddenly disappear from your life, by their own hand or yours, and then what, you shack up with the first loser who doesn’t care an iota about your life before you met him,”  
“And how do you figure that?”  
“You said yourself that he wouldn’t understand about Daisuke, I assumed that meant you hadn’t told him about everything, if you’re still insecure about it after all this time with him; maybe you should rethink it,”  
I was silent for a short moment before making up my mind.  
“Fine, you know what? I’m going to tell him everything about Daisuke, he’ll take it like a mature human being and we’ll continue our relationship being completely honest with each other, is that what you want?”  
“Well at least you’ll be better for it, even if you are doing it out of spite,” he said as he stopped outside Ichiro’s apartment block. I poked my tongue out at him as I got out of the car, but he was already on his pinePhone, texting God-knows-who. So much for the concerned friend act he’d been trying to pull.  
I climbed up the forty-two stairs to Ichiro’s floor, and knocked on his door. I was just going to come out and say it. Why I’d been out of touch for the past two days, why I’d snapped at him just before that and why I needed to tell him about my past.  
The door opened and I was greeted by the most beautiful man I’d ever met, his jet-black hair flowed down past his shoulders and his dark eyes looked like they could see into your soul. Well, that’s how I usually described him; tonight Ichiro was looking down at my shoes and his divine locks were hidden behind his neck in a ponytail.  
“What are you doing here, I thought we were taking a break,” he said before I could open my mouth.  
“Uh, no… I was a little upset but I’m over it now,” he still hadn’t looked at me, and I was struggling to understand what was happening.  
“Well I, I’ve got some stuff going on at the moment, and I just need to deal with it myself, so would it be okay if we took a step back for a bit?”  
“I’m not in the best state at the moment either,” not that he had asked, “but I can be there for you Ichiro, I can help you through this, if you tell me I’ll listen, we can be there for each other,”  
“No, Hikari,” he looked at me for the first time and for the third time today I saw a look in someone’s eyes that I didn’t quite like. This time it was a soul wrenchingly blank look of indifference. A lump formed in my throat, “this thing it isn’t something that can be talked out, whatever it is I’m sure you’ll get through it, you always seem to,” he tried to put a comforting hand on my shoulder, but I turned away so I didn’t have to look at him anymore. “I’ll call you when I’m ready again, okay?” he said with a hint of worry.  
“Fine, but just so you know, I might not be there to answer.”

* * *

I had only just managed to stem the flow of tears when I got back down to street level and I was just in time to see Koushiro’s car roll off into the distance.  
Why did everyone abandon me? First it was Daisuke three years ago, but I was fine with that until I abandoned Takeru and realised that Daisuke wasn’t coming back. Then Jou helped me through it, he was so much older that there was no subtext in our conversations, we were purely plutonic, and I loved that. But then he really dived into his last couple of years in medical school, and again I was abandoned. But again, I was okay with it, because I soon met Ichiro and it all just clicked, we laughed, we lived, we fell in love and we waited. But all that time, Takeru and Daisuke still haunted me. How could Takeru be so blind? And how could Daisuke leave when I, when we all, needed him most?  
How could he just disappear? And why? After all this time I still didn’t even know why! And then I finally get a chance to find out everything, wipe out at least half of the pain that had been eating away at me for the past three years, and then he goes and gets himself killed.  
Then I realise the only one left is Koushiro and he convinces me that Ichiro is the answer, only for him to turn around and drop me just when I was finally ready to tell him everything, something I’d told myself I’d only do if I completely trusted someone outside the group. And I did, I trusted him more than I’d ever trusted anyone in my whole life and he just decides he can’t do it anymore. Did I really mean that little to him?  
Am I that far gone? Am I beyond saving? I should just pack my bags now and jump straight back into the Ocean I’d fought so hard to escape and live there alone, with all the death and destruction weighing me down until not even those lame Crests could save me.  
And just when I thought there wasn’t even anyone left to abandon me, Koushiro drives off into the distance without so much as a glance in his rear-view mirror.  
As if hearing my despair the night sky opened up and wept with me, as if it knew I was thinking that it couldn’t possibly get any worse.  
I started walking back home, to mother’s, to Taichi’s rehab clinic. It was only half an hour by foot and there was shelter most of the way. But right now I didn’t care that I was getting soaked, it made my outside feel like my inside.  
A car pulled up in front of me. A pretentious little eco car that said more about the person driving it than it did for cleaner living. Wondering about why someone with a Prius would even consider driving also made me wonder why Koushiro drove everywhere. It was an odd habit to have in Tokyo, what with the public transport system so efficient and the congestion on the roads so heavy.  
“Hikari, is that you?” came the voice from the car, and I kept walking. Oh God, not now.  
The car drove on and parked at the next available space. “Hikari, it’s raining, I’ll give you a lift,” came the voice once more as I stormed past.  
I completely understood the choice of car now. All ‘great artists’ need their causes. The car changed location once more, but this time Takeru got out and flung a heavy coat over my head.  
“I’m fine Takeru, go back into your little Earth-saving bubble and leave me out here in the rain, I’m doing just fine without you,” Why did I ever think that things couldn’t get worse? Because whenever I do they invariably find a way to do just that.  
“I was going to go see you anyway, so we may as well get it all over with now, come on I’ll drive you to your mother’s, get you out of this rain, and maybe we could talk a little in the car,”  
“Why would you want to go and do a thing like that?” I asked, but no sooner had the words escaped my lips, two names popped into my head. Daisuke was the first, but more importantly the second was Iori. That little nuisance had gone behind my back.  
“You know exactly why,” I looked at him for the first time in three years, and it pleased me to see that he didn’t look that great. It might have just been the rain but his hair looked more ragged than I remembered and the off-trend clothes he wore looked like he hadn’t ever washed them. He had bags under his eyes, and what could have been anything between a three-day to three-month growth on his face that looked absolutely horrible. I almost felt sorry for him.  
Almost.  
I weighed up my options. I could be stubborn and continue to walk home and have our ‘conversation’ later, since he was so intent on having it, or I could let him take me home and maybe the conversation would be over before we got there. Either way I didn’t really feel like having the conversation at all and would have preferred it if Iori had kept his big mouth shut.  
“Fine,” I almost couldn’t believe I’d said it, “I’ll take your lift, but we aren’t talking tonight, I’m tired, I’m cold and I just want this day to end.”  
Takeru accepted my terms and took me home. It was the lowest of lows, accepting a ride from the one person I never wanted to see again, but at least the day would be over, and tomorrow I would be able to face whatever hells Takeru was about to remind me of.


	6. I'll Be There For You

I was home. I had avoided talking to Takeru. I was happy about that, but not much else.  
Mother was just finishing making dinner, and I sat and ate it in silence when she served me. Taichi was in his room doing God knows what on his laptop which largely meant that I could sneak off to my room later to avoid another confrontation. We hadn’t always fought, but just recently he’d become a bit overprotective and it really got on my nerves. At his age he should be so absorbed in work and finding a girl that I shouldn’t even matter.  
But he just wasn’t up for it at the moment.  
I finished dinner and escaped to my bedroom. I was tired, I’d told my mother, it had been a long day.  
I turned my laptop on and lay down on my bed. What could I do to take my mind of things? I briefly looked over at my pinePod. Nope, listening to music would definitely not help.  
I didn’t really want to talk to anyone, but I checked into Skype anyway. No messages there.  
I checked my email. Mimi had sent her heartfelt condolences at the news of Daisuke’s death, but the message was short and I could tell that it wasn’t really going to affect her for more than maybe an hour. She always had much more important things to do than keep in touch with all of us. There wasn’t anything from Sora and Yamato which was odd considering they both knew Daisuke better than Mimi.  
I checked Facebook. Boring post on boring post filled the feed. Thankfully no-one had made an ‘RIP Daisuke Motomiya’ page yet, I don’t think I could’ve handled it. I looked at my profile picture. Ichiro and I arm in arm looking out from the top of Tokyo tower earlier this month. He’d just been hired by a private contractor and had bought me a gorgeous necklace with the entirety of his initial pay check.  
I hovered over our relationship status as I fingered the necklace absent-mindedly. Should I change our status to ‘It’s complicated’? I didn’t think he’d appreciate it, but that would be the whole point. Before I could make a decision I heard the familiar chime of a Skype call coming through.  
Just what I needed.  
Not.  
I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that it was just Sora. I accepted the call and got a screen-full of her lovely face and what I’m sure many men, my brother included, would call lovely cleavage.  
“Hey, I need to sit up, give me a second,” I said, whilst repositioning myself in the way I’d described to her. I looked at the clock in the corner of the screen; it was nine thirty here, so it was probably sometime in the morning over there, “What time is it over there?”  
“Half past eight,”  
“So you’ve just woken up?”  
“Yeah,” she gave a yawn, “Yamato’s still sleeping, he had a gig last night, I gave it a miss, but I saw the first ten shows, they were pretty amazing, I can’t believe how popular he is over here now, no-one can even understand what he’s singing, but they’re going crazy over it,” She was obviously a bit surprised, but I think she was more proud than anything else. This was her man she was talking about, “But that’s not what I’m here to talk about,”  
“Oh, I didn’t realise you had an agenda,”  
“No, but you hardly want to hear about rock concerts and America,”  
“Oh, but I do, anything to take my mind off everything that happened today,”  
“Today? Didn’t that happen yesterday?”  
“Believe me what happened today was much worse, but go on, what was the atmosphere like, did they all sing along to that one new song he had with English in it?”  
Sora reluctantly went into details about the crowd surfing and circle pits, and yes everyone sung along to ‘Porianduri’, but there were some others that they sung along to even though they were in Japanese. She said it was amazing how quickly he became a sensation; his hit was only a couple of months old.  
America itself was all that they had imagined it to be. It was bigger and better than everywhere else she’d been in almost every way. The food was so much greasier and the serves were so much bigger. She kept going, only stopping when I asked her little questions about this and that. They hadn’t gotten to New York yet, that was the next stop but Philadelphia had really impressed her.  
She continued on a bit longer but she finally managed to again bring the conversation back to me. She asked how I was handling everything and if I was okay, and I told her about how Iori had figured that I’d gone over to Daisuke’s to sleep with him, and that I wanted to because I didn’t trust my boyfriend and I was still angry at Takeru. I admitted to her that yes, Iori was probably right but he didn’t need to say it so verbally. Then I told her about how Koushiro had taken me home and how he’d stepped in when Taichi and I had been fighting. She asked what was up with Taichi and I said “replacing his relationships with you two with alcohol,” to which she looked slightly uncomfortable about. She asked how bad it was and I recounted the incident where he didn’t even know who I was and told her how over protective he’d become. She’d said it was probably just the alcohol talking and changed the subject to my boyfriend, so I told her how we were kind of ‘on hiatus’.  
“What does that even mean?” she asked.  
“It means that we both still like each other very much but we’re not seeing each other for a while,”  
“Sounds stupid,”  
“It is,”  
Then I thought I may as well tell her about how Takeru had spotted me and taken me home, and how he’d said we were going to have ‘a talk’ soon and how much I hated myself for even accepting his offer; how I’d sunk to my lowest depths. She was as comforting as she could possibly be considering she was on the other side of the planet and in front of a computer screen, which obviously wasn’t as much as she or I wished. I took a few deep breaths and thanked her for listening. Koushiro had been right about me needing to tell someone how I was feeling. I wasn’t so sure about how I felt about Koushiro being right about it though.  
Sora said she would be on Skype pretty much every morning so if ever I needed someone to talk to, she was there.

I shut off the computer and put it away. Even though I’d managed to pawn off some of my emotional baggage, there was still too much floating around my head to go straight to sleep. I tossed and I turned until well into the night.


	7. Blinded

I awoke to the sounds of snoring and a telephone ringing. Urgh, what time was it? It took all my effort to turn over and look at the clock by my bedside.  
Eleven am. That explained why Taichi was still snoring.  
I let my phone ring out and rubbed my eyes. I must’ve really needed the sleep.  
The phone rang again. But this time mother came in and told me to pick up. I answered it reluctantly, knowing that it must be something important for them to call back instead of leaving a message.  
“Hikari! How are you?”  
I hadn’t looked at the phone before answering, so I was a little surprised to hear the familiar nasal tones of soon-to-be-doctor Kidou.  
“Hey Jou, I’m…” I tried to think of the right word, “tired, what’s up?”  
“Just thought I’d call and invite you to the celebration I’m having tomorrow night to celebrate having no more exams, ever. I’ll finally be able to help people in just a few short months! I’m so excited. So what do you say? Are you home? Is Taichi? Tell him for me, I’m inviting the whole gang. Well, everyone except Mimi and Takeru because they’re not in Tokyo at the moment as far as I know, but anyway I haven’t seen everyone in so long I can’t wait!”  
“You do know Sora is touring with Yamato in America right now don’t you?” I knew he’d been studying hard, and I knew about the communications blackout he’d imposed, but surely he at least remembered that Yamato’s band had gone international. If he didn’t know that, he obviously didn’t know about Daisuke, or Takeru being back in town. Takeru… Did I still need to talk to him? “Oh yeah, I forgot about that, but I’ll get everyone else it’s going to be great.” I thought for a moment and made a spur of the moment decision.  
“Hey, Jou I don’t want to-” I started but Jou’s mind was obviously going much faster than mine.  
“Did Daisuke call? He said he was going to get in touch with you sometime this week,”  
“No he texted… Wait how do you…?”  
“He ran into me while I was walking off the train a few nights ago, we sat down and had a cup of tea, he mentioned he was trying to find the courage to talk to you again. How did it go?”  
I paused. What should I say? Should I burst his happy little bubble? I decided to play it more cautious.  
“What did you two talk about?”  
“Well, he told me where he’d been and what he’d been doing, asked me how Med school was going, asked a couple of odd questions about pregnancy which was a bit weird, and yeah he said not to tell anyone he was in town until he’d talked to you first, and I said that with all this studying for finals I’d kind of stopped socialising with everyone, but that it was still good to catch up with him after so long. So did you not go and see him?”  
“No I did…”  
“Wonder why our little chat didn’t come up then, but you two were probably talking about more important things,”  
“Jou, I, uh,” How could I tell him? How could I tell him something like this while he’s in such a good mood? “We didn’t actually do that much talking…”  
“Oh, uh, did you and Ichiro…?”  
“NO! – Well yes but, that’s – it’s not like what you’re thinking,”  
“Well…?”  
I told him. From the sound on the other end of the line, it made him drop the phone.

* * *

When Jou had recovered I told him that if he wanted to come and talk about it he could, but that I wasn’t leaving the house for anyone today. He said he’d probably be over in a couple of hours.  
I clicked off, and checked to make sure it was Jou who had called before. It was a number that wasn’t in my contacts so I ignored it, and checked my texts. I had one from one of my college friends asking me and Ichiro to a party in a couple of days’ time. I replied with ‘I’ll be there babe, but Ichiro’s on the backburner for a while, time to get on the prowl, rawr ;)’ holding a completely straight face as I did so. I probably wouldn’t go considering everything but, she didn’t need to know that until I cancelled hours before it started. She was a bit of a bitch anyway, so I didn’t mind.  
I had another one from Iori, which looked like a Miyako induced, or should I say ‘forced’, apology for having a hunch and running with it. He did everything but add ‘but I was right, wasn’t I?’ to the end of his message, so I texted back a seemingly polite little acceptance message, layered with spiteful subtext that I knew would go straight over his head.  
I had one from the same number that had called me just before Jou. It read ‘So when are we going to have this talk’ – It had to be Takeru, I’d removed him from my contacts list after it all went down three years ago. He obviously hadn’t gotten rid of mine. What could I say?  
‘Tomorrow, I need a rest, stop bugging me’ I got the reply creepily fast, like he was actually watching his phone for a reply.  
His message said, ‘Can’t do that, I’ve got to go back tomorrow, work’  
I typed in, _‘yeah, like what you do for a living could be considered work’_ and then erased it. I sent back ‘Fine, see you in 30 mins, I’m kicking you out at 12.30, I’ve got plans.’  
I put my phone away, not waiting for a reply, and convinced myself I had to get out of bed. Taichi was still snoring as usual, which meant that I didn’t have to deal with whatever fresh hell was going to pop into my head when I saw him. He would probably stay asleep until a long time after I sent Takeru packing.  
I stumbled out of bed and towards the bathroom.  
 _Takeru_.  
Even thinking about his name made me want to take a shower and wash off all the memories that accompanied it. Lucky that was what I was here for.  
I stepped into the shower and turned the tap. I felt the warmth fall down onto my hair and cascade down; that was better.  
I tried to go about my usual routine focusing solely on getting clean and getting out, but Takeru was still on my mind.  
I thought back to that day three years ago and that terrible, awful turn of events that changed everything. I didn’t want to think about it, but my mind didn’t give a damn about what I did and did not want. It almost felt surreal remembering it now, almost like the feelings I’d had were someone else’s. How I wished that were so.

I had thought it was going to be The Day; the day when everything came together and Takeru finally admitted what I had known all along and I could finally tell him it was mutual.  
He’d called me up and asked if I wanted to see what he’d been working on, on-and-off for the past year or so. I knew what it was; it was the worst kept secret in the entire history of our little group. Even Daisuke’s little obsession with me was more covert than Takeru’s plan to write up all of our adventures. The main reason everyone knew was that he interviewed just about everyone except me, and told them not to tell me because he was going to surprise me. Now, I know that to most people a recount of events that they had been a part of wouldn’t seem to be the most romantic thing in the world, but to me back then, already knowing how beautifully Takeru wrote, and how much all of our escapades had meant to me; I thought it was just so damn perfect.  
So I’d gone over, heck I practically ran from the train stop to his mother’s apartment, and I’d tried to act normal. We’d talked for a bit, I’d sat a bit closer to him than I usually did, and at one point I said something cute, something I can’t even remember, aside from the look we shared afterwards; long and longing.  
I could’ve lived in that moment forever, and now that moment was the one that caused me the most pain. I can still remember that look of hope on his face he’d shifted to as he realised that now was the perfect time to show me his perfect gift. He had gently grasped my hand and led me to his room where he sat me in front of an old desktop. I’d never seen it before so I asked him when he’d got it, just as polite conversation. He’d told me he’d got it second-hand, exclusively for this little project about a year ago. Reduce, reuse, recycle.  
And then he told me what his little project was and who it was for exactly, and I’d kissed him hard, our lips locked and we pulled into each other for just long enough to confirm that we had waited far too long. Takeru was the one who had pulled away first, _didn’t I want to read it?_  
I’d bit my lip and turned toward the screen. It was a simple word document, and I sat down with him and read it in his arms and on his lap. It was more beautiful than I could have imagined, it started in the beginning from Takeru’s point of view.  
I could still remember how it started: _It was the night that changed everything, it was the night I first saw her, of course back then I’d thought she was just part of the dream, the dream I’d shared with my brother, the dream that had turned out to be oh so real, the dream that had started like this._  
It was more beautiful than I had thought, even the battle scenes were epic in the extreme, always improving as the text went on, but that wasn’t what I was most intrigued by. It was the relationships between us and all the others that got me. He didn’t paint anyone as being perfect, least of all me, but it was the way he wrote in the unspoken that truly floored me. It was the inferences, the innuendo, the optimism in his words that made me feel as if I hadn’t experienced what he’d written in any other way.  
It took me all night to finish the first half of the story and by the time I had finished I was already in love with my younger self. I hadn’t thought it possible to fall even more in love with the teenage boy who had by that time fallen asleep on the floor next to the computer, but in that moment I knew I had.  
In the morning I had gone on to read the rest, after sleeping on the couch so I didn’t arouse any suspicion from Takeru’s mother, and the second half only affirmed what I’d gathered from the first half; that this work was a masterpiece of a love letter.  
He had changed the ending though, in this we ended up looking like pioneers rather than chosen few because in the end everyone became just like us with otherworldly partners for every boy and every girl. It was a humble ending and I had liked it. I remember I had been so overwhelmed by everything that all I wanted to do was cry in Takeru’s arms at how perfect he had made it all sound, at the beauty and terror of his writing, at the things left unsaid that leapt off the page straight from his heart to mine. But I kissed him instead, and it was like every moment in my life had been leading up to that kiss. It felt like it lasted forever, and we tried, we really tried to make it so. By the time we managed to disengage we were too late.  
The pop-up had popped up and when I saw what was on it I felt fear for the first time in almost six years.

I couldn’t handle the memories that came after, I could barely handle the ones I’d just thought about, but thankfully mother came in to tell me to stop wasting water, and that Takeru was here to see me. She was just leaving to do some grocery shopping and did I need anything, to which my answer was no. I quickly dried my hair so that it stuck up at all angles and wrapped the towel around me.  
I dashed out the door and to my room, trying and failing miserably to avoid awkward eye contact with Takeru. He was sitting at the kitchen table and his eyes lingered for just that beat too long. I gave him a scowl, but he was already pretending to interest himself in the palm of his hand and didn’t see.  
I threw on the most unappealing outfit I could find and left my hair a mess. Like I was really going to make an effort for _him_.  
“So, what’s the deal, why do you have to talk to me?” I demanded as I sat across from the filth of a man who was still in his clothes from last night.  
“I just can’t believe he’s gone, he was so…” he trailed off. Was Takeru actually genuinely upset? I doubted it, “I always thought that Daisuke would live on forever, that he wouldn’t accept that his time had come so vehemently that Death himself would actually believe him and go harvest some other poor soul,” trust the writer to come up with some metaphor or whatever to elicit sympathy. He wasn’t getting anything out of me. There was silence for a moment and then he continued, “I just wish I’d known him better you know, there was always that subtle rivalry between us over you that I don’t think I really had a chance to just relax with him, shoot the breeze, talk about something without both of us feeling we were competing,”  
“How, can-” The doorbell interrupted me and I excused myself to go and let Jou in, silently cursing the fact that his presence would mean I couldn’t argue with Takeru as forcefully as I would like.  
Only, when I reached the door it was not the tall, nerdy-yet-handsome doctor who had rung the bell, but a police detective.


	8. El Distorto De Melodica

The look of surprise on the young girl’s face was expected by the detective, but the unkempt hair and mismatched outfit were not. He was a compulsive profiler which was both an advantage and disadvantage in his line of work. At times like these it was distracting and the detective had a job to do.  
He entered the Yagami residence upon the girl’s invitation, of course she could spare a moment of her time, and there was no point in being uncooperative with the law. He took off his immaculate shiny white shoes in the entrance hall and slipped them neatly into the shoe rack.  
He took note of the other man in the kitchen-dining-living room because he was dressed in a similar haphazard fashion as the girl. He did not know who the man was; a boyfriend perhaps. The girl seemed awkward when she told the man to find something to do whilst she talked to the detective. The man said he would rather listen to the conversation and when the detective had put forward no objections so long as the girl was okay with it, the girl had just shrugged and mumbled something about the man finding out later anyway.  
The detective wondered if the girl, whom he knew from his initial interview at the crime scene was named Hikari, would be intrigued, outraged or saddened by the evidence he was about to show her.  
He eased her into it. He told her that he was just trying to get a bit more of an insight into the deceased’s life; they had found that the deceased had rented an apartment in Osaka but hadn’t been able to find any friends that he had made over there that could assist with the investigation.  
She told the detective about the deceased’s character, his personality, his general bull-headedness and charm. She obviously remembered him fondly so the detective queried her as to their relationship. She had said that the deceased had always been vying for her affection, but needed prompting before admitting that yes, back before the deceased had removed himself from their friendship group, she had, at times felt things for him. This was a logical assumption that the detective had made during his first encounter with the girl, but it was nice to see that the other man’s presence wasn’t going to affect her answers. In fact, it seemed that she actually enjoyed the little squirm the other man had made when she had mentioned that her relationship with the deceased hadn’t been all one sided.  
The detective then went about re-establishing why she had responded so eagerly to the deceased’s text message. Did she still have feelings for him?  
The detective knew that her answer of being curious as to what caused him to disappear and reappear such a long time later was a lie because she hadn’t asked anything when the detective had mentioned the deceased’s living in Osaka. The actions and the words didn’t match up.  
He changed tack and asked her what she’d been doing earlier in the day when she had received the text message. She had been home alone, she said. So that meant no alibi.  
The detective decided he was going to throw her off even more, and asked if her boyfriend had known that she was going to meet the deceased that night. She said that Ichiro and her had had a little argument the night before and that it wasn’t like what the detective was thinking. The detective loved it when people made statements like that because more often than not it meant that it was exactly like what the detective was thinking.  
He decided that he’d had enough of the charade, took out the photographs and asked if she could explain how they ended up in the drafts folder of one of the many email accounts accessed through the deceased's computer. After the initial shock wore off, her face saddened as she flicked through the pile, before it turned a bright pink as she quickly flicked through the final few. The other man reached out to take a look, but she shot daggers at him as she handed them back to the detective.  
The detective smiled as he placed the pictures back inside his jacket, and asked if she had been aware that the deceased had been stalking her, and she had shaken her head. He then asked her if her boyfriend had known, and he noticed just the slightest twitch of a smile play upon her features as she replied. Her boyfriend didn’t even know who the deceased was, and would have told her if he suspected something as serious as someone stalking her.  
In the back of the detective’s mind he removed the image of the other man being the girl’s boyfriend whilst still maintaining the flow of his little fishing expedition and asked why he was so interested in programming. The girl responded that she didn’t quite think her boyfriend’s profession had anything to do with the untimely death of her old friend and the detective had to apologise and iterate that he had meant the deceased’s interest in programming. She did not believe he had any.  
The detective found this interesting, not just because he had a string of emails sent from the deceased’s account to many individuals involved in the ‘computer industry’, but because of the way the other man had shifted in his seat when the detective had clarified his question. The detective decided he’d move on the other man. He turned out to be a friend of the deceased as well from around the same time as the girl, only he had not known him as well as her. The other man had said that he had last seen the deceased two years previously at a party that the other man’s girlfriend had dragged him along to in Osaka. The deceased and the other man had talked about how weird it was dropping out of school so young and the other man had admitted confiding many things to the deceased that he may not have under more normal circumstances, it was nothing, the other man had assured the detective, particularly embarrassing.  
The detective asked the other man about the deceased’s interest in computers, but he echoed the girl’s words. He was clearly ill at ease but the detective didn’t push it, questioning the other man had merely been to distract the girl some more, make her wonder what the detective’s real motives were.  
The girl asked if the detective knew what the deceased had been doing over in Osaka. The detective didn’t know if she was just covering herself for not asking before or genuinely interested, but he could not see any harm in telling her that so far they had found his apartment over there but as of yet still had no idea how he had enough money to rent it, or the one he had leased in Tokyo where she had found his remains. There was definitely a girlfriend in the picture but the other officers were having a hard time finding her. They also hadn’t found the deceased’s phone which was a nice segue to his main point.  
“Mr Motomiya was confirmed to be deceased by the time you received the text to come and see him that night, the killer wanted you, and you alone to find the body.”


	9. No It Isn't

“Taichi, wake up!” I yelled at the lump in my brother’s bed, “Jou’s here and we’re going out for tea, and you need to get out of the house,”  
To be perfectly honest, it was me who needed to get out of the house after the detective’s call. I didn’t quite know why he’d come and told me all those things but I knew I had to get away from where he told them to me, if only for a short while.  
“I just heard that Sora and Yamato are back in town and we’re meeting them at the teahouse…” I got nothing for my blatant lie; I was at least expecting him to throw something at me, like a brick or something. I walked towards his bed, the covers were over his head and I could hear his snoring muffled by the sheets.  
I gave him a nudge. Nothing. Thoughts of a similar scene rushed into my mind as I stuttered a little.  
“Ta-Taichi?”  
The snoring stopped mid-breath and I heard a click before it started again slightly louder. I threw the covers off, screamed a few obscenities and took the tape out of the cassette player he’d hidden under the covers with the extra pillows.  
“All right lets go,” I said as I left, throwing the tape violently through my open door as I did so. I’d fixed my hair but I really didn’t feel like dressing to go out. Who knew, maybe windcheaters and tracksuit pants would come into fashion by the time we made it to our favourite little tea house. I was still a little shaken by what the detective had said. Not so much the stalking, I’d always kind of thought Daisuke might stoop to that level at some point, but that was before he left, not after. I was more worried about the way the detective had simply stated that the killer had been the one who lured me there, excused himself and left without even asking me what I thought. Was I to be bait? Was he going to follow me to see who I would confront, listening in for some kind of confession?  
That was part of the reason I wanted to get out of the house, to see if he would follow, but it was mainly to get away from that room where he had implied so many horrid things. I’ve seen too many cop shows to know that he was thinking I’d found out Daisuke was stalking me, killed him and then texted myself an appointment to become a witness and then have half an ear into the investigation.  
But Jou was here now and it calmed me down a bit. We both sat in the back of Takeru’s Prius, because I didn’t want to sit next to Takeru, and Jou didn’t think I should be in the back by myself considering everything I’d been through.  
I asked him about his exams and he seemed to think he’d done well. He was just glad that he never had to think about exams again.  
“Do you know how many times everyone was in danger and I couldn’t help because I was locked up in a room with no chance of escape, no way of even knowing you people were in trouble?”  
“Three,” said Takeru from the front, clearly concentrating on driving inhibited his ability to judge the rhetoric nature of a question, and when someone wasn’t talking to him.  
“Well, I guess it felt like more, because after those first two times, every exam or test I took had me worried that some kind of calamity was going to occur while I was out of touch. And then that last time three years ago…” He trailed off, deep in thought. I caught a slightly worried look from Takeru in the rear view mirror, and I knew he didn’t want Jou to continue as much as I didn’t, “You know, when I think back to that day I always seem to blame myself for not being there. As much as you guys don’t want to talk about it, and I respect that, I always envied you, because you got some closure, you know how it all went down, you saw it, and now that I think about it Daisuke probably felt the same way when he found out,”  
Before I could really think about what Jou had just said, we had pulled up at the tea house. As far as we could tell we hadn’t been followed.  
When we were seated, we stared at the guy behind the counter washing cups and saucers until he noticed. He looked up and understood, asking the other man, who was waiting for the new party of three to come up and order something. He shook his head, which made the dish-washer motion around at the empty store. The other man seemed annoyed but the dish-washer gave a short little bow and came towards us.  
“Hey, why are you guys all here, I mean I can guess why, but why here?”  
“Ken…” I said, and raised my eyebrows. He looked a little embarrassed as he realised.  
“Oh, well do you guys want to order? The boss said he’ll kick you out if you don’t,”  
Takeru went up to order and I filled in Ken on what had happened with the inspector, just like I’d told Jou earlier. By the time I’d finished Takeru was back and Ken’s boss had brought out our green teas, and Takeru’s coffee.  
“I know Daisuke was a bit – ‘you know’ – with you but I never thought… Stalking?” That was Ken’s reaction, and it was pretty similar to what Jou had said before. Takeru spoke up.  
“It doesn’t make sense; you don’t go from overt displays of affection to covert ones after nine years, especially if you have a one track mind like he did,”  
“And what makes you an expert?” I’d asked. I was already sick of him hanging around and I think that the strain of the past few days hadn’t quite worn off yet. But really I’d take any chance to argue with Takeru.  
“I write Hikari, it means I have to get into other people’s heads, you’ve got to be a little bit of a psycho-analyst sometimes,”  
“No it means you get to make shit up,”  
“Are we really going to go into this now?”  
“You know, it would make a little bit of sense,” Takeru and I looked at Jou, it was as if he didn’t even notice we were in the middle of an argument, “he was fixated on you for so long, and when he left to make a clean break and leave you in peace, maybe he couldn’t let go, and without the release of constantly hitting on you, his lust manifested itself in a more voyeuristic fashion.”  
I felt uncomfortable hearing Jou talk about Daisuke like that, like I wasn’t even there, but before I could warn him off, Ken stuck his foot in.  
“He wasn’t like that,” We all looked at him, it was the most forceful we’d heard him talk since he’d started going around with Miyako. “He, he was…” We waited, Ken was obviously a little nervous, he stared into his tea cup, analysing the flow of the tea leaves as they swirled around his cup, “I know he wouldn’t do it, okay, can we talk about something else?”  
“When did you see him last?”  
“Takeru, he said he wanted to talk about something else,”  
“Hikari, are you sure you’re okay?”  
“Jou, stop, everyone stop!”  
We all looked at Ken again.  
“I saw him last about eight months ago,” That was news to me, and from the looks on Jou and Takeru’s faces it was news to them too. “When he left we kept in touch, he was trying to let you live your life, Hikari, he knew it was the best thing for you and I knew he was right. So whenever anyone asked, I said I didn’t know anything because I had to respect his wishes.  
“We met on occasion when I went to Osaka to visit my grandparents, and it’s been kil–” he stopped and chose his words more carefully, “breaking my heart having to hide it from everyone. But not as much as it was eating at Daisuke that he hadn’t been there when it all went down just after he’d left,” Ken finally looked up from his cup and he was clearly upset, “but he was still the same old Daisuke, he wasn’t going to let it get to him, he said that if he gave in like that, it truly meant that we had lost, and he said he could never let that happen,” he looked from me to Takeru, "I didn't–" he looked a Jou and went quiet. Jou didn't notice, or he didn't understand what he meant, and niether did I until days later.  
“He was a good man,” Jou said.  
“Besides,” I said, thinking slightly more clearly than I had been up to this point, “the detective said that he had a girlfriend, surely he couldn’t have been stalking me and having a relationship?”  
“I didn’t think he had one, but it was possible he did, like I said, he didn’t even tell me about his job,” said Ken and I almost asked him what they did talk about with Daisuke if it wasn’t about work and relationships, but Jou decided he needed to comment as well.  
“He did ask me about pregnancy the other day, so maybe he did have one. Either that or he knocked someone up,” I hadn’t told Ken that Jou had seen him more recently than anyone else, and so he got the same abridged version of events that I had on the phone this morning. “But yeah, it was weird when he was asking me all that stuff about pregnancy, he wanted to know if it was possible to pinpoint the night of conception, and I told him that if you had the date of birth, you could count back nine months but that was about it. He seemed a little disappointed when I told him it meant you had about a week of give,”  
“So maybe there was a girl who was claiming he was the father of her child, and he didn’t believe her,” ventured Takeru, “or maybe he was trying to prove that he was the father, but couldn’t force the girl to get a paternity test,”  
“I don’t know, he said he needed to go and I didn’t get the chance to ask,”  
We stopped speculating about Daisuke after that. Ken asked how Jou’s exams had gone, and Jou had told a couple of interesting stories about lost notes, and late night trips to the library. Jou had asked about Takeru’s television project, and Takeru said that the producers had asked him to pen a third season, which would hopefully be screening sometime near the end of next year, pending the success of the second season which was due to start in a couple of weeks. It was unprecedented, he had said a little too smugly, for someone of his young age.  
“And how is Satomi,” I asked, trying unsuccessfully to get him to snap at me.  
“We broke up about a month ago,”  
“And they’re still thinking about giving you a third season?”  
Sadly, he rose above my goading and started up a conversation with Ken about Miyako, while Jou raised an eyebrow at me and let me know just how juvenile I was behaving, but I didn’t care.  
Some other customers came in, and Ken said he had to get back to work, Jou said we should probably leave, so I gave Ken a hug and said goodbye. Jou told him that he and Miyako were invited to his little get together, even though it would probably be a bit quieter than he’d intended considering the obvious. Takeru had a quiet word to Ken before we left, and then asked if it would be okay if Jou and I got our own way home, since he really needed to get back to Osaka so he could work the next day. Jou said goodbye, extending the same invitation to Takeru as he had to Ken. As Takeru drove off in his eco-mobile, Jou asked me why I’d been so harsh on him.  
“I just think that passing off fact as fiction and getting it produced by your girlfriend’s father, is not the best business ethics, even if no one else remembers, and I’m not about to let him get away with it. I know I’m not the only one.”  
“The guy has come all this way to see if you’re okay and you treat him like he’s nothing, he’s given you two lifts in Tokyo’s infamous traffic and you go and beat down on the man’s achievements, cut the man some slack, he’s hurting just as much as you,”  
I didn’t have an answer to that.


	10. Your Man

She heard him come in and immediately knew there was something wrong.  
“My day was fine, how are you,” She called out even though he hadn’t asked.  
He sat down at the table and mumbled a response in the positive, in a way which made it sound as if it had been the opposite.  
“I made your favourite. Well, mother made it and I reheated it, but it’s the thought that counts. Are you hungry now, or do you want it later?” She asked him cheerfully. The death of a friend called for the ‘taking his mind off it’ approach.  
“Later, I think,” was the response. It didn’t really please her all that much because now she was going to have to reheat his food again.  
“Well, I’m having mine now because it looks delicious,” She came and sat down at the table next to him with a big plate of noodles. Usually, he would ask why she was eating so much, but today she didn’t get to use her cute little reason. She dug in anyway.  
Half way through he looked up at her and she mumbled “What?” through a mouthful of noodles that were so long they were both in her mouth and on her plate.  
“I’m sorry,” She stopped chewing and let the remaining noodles drop. She didn’t like that tone.  
“Hm?”  
“It’s been gnawing at me and gnawing at me and it’s come to a head,” She didn’t like where this was going, she swallowed, and let him continue, “I just... We always said... and I just can’t anymore,”  
“Yes you can,” He looked confused at what she had said, he had no idea, none at all, it was almost an insult, “I know,”  
“No you don’t, you don’t know anything,” He couldn’t look at her. Was it shame?  
“But I do know! I know exactly what you’re talking about, and frankly I won’t stand for what you’re trying not to say out loud!”  
“What?”  
“We’ve come too far for you to back out now, have you thought about–” he cut her off.  
“What do you mean, ‘You know’, how could you _know_? How long?”  
“Please, a woman knows, normal teenagers don’t get _those_ problems,”  
“So it’s not normal now?”  
“That’s not what I meant; it’s just a word,” She could see his brain working overtime, the leaps and bounds a mind could take with just a skerrick of information were amazing.  
“He was asking about... Are they? Are they mine?”  
“What do you mean, of course! Why wouldn’t they be?” She could see he didn’t accept her answer; he rubbed his temple in frustration.  
“Look at me when you say it,” She picked her eyes off the table and looked at him before reiterating.  
“They are yours,” She looked away, “I think,”  
“Y-You think?”  
“It was one night, and it was stupid, and I made it up to you the very next day, and then I was late, and you were all happy and saying ‘we can make this work’, and I just wanted you so bad, that I didn’t even care when I found out about what you’d been doing while I was doing what I’d been doing and I thought I understood because of your parents and all that and I just... and then he came back asking questions and I just-”  
“Wait, you spoke to... When? You didn’t. Oh God please tell me you didn’t.”  
The look in her eyes told him everything he needed to know. The words that came out of her mouth were superfluous to the conversation.


	11. Under Cover Of Darkness

“Hello Mother,”  
Natsuko Takaishi looked at the man at her door and had to admit she was a little confused. Hadn’t she told him not to come back?  
“What are you doing here?”  
“I just want to check on my stuff, I’m assuming you haven’t thrown it out yet,”  
“No, I haven’t touched your room, but we got broken into a few months ago, and I don’t know what they took,”  
“I know that, mother. Well, can I come in?” She didn’t look like she was going to move any time soon.  
“I have company,”  
“So what? I’ll be quick, and it’s not like I’m going to know who it is,” The way she looked away from him told Takeru everything he needed to know, “Oh you’re not doing that again,” he said and pushed past.  
“Takeru!”  
He dashed through the hall. _Did they really think that going through this all again was a good idea? Don’t they remember how well it went last time they tried?_  
“Hello father, can’t talk, I’m in a bit of a hurry,”  
He cracked open the door to his room and saw the dust had been disturbed around his wardrobe. All this stuff with his parents would have to wait. He prayed that what he’d left in there still was.  
He opened it.  
It wasn’t.  
Shit.  
He walked out of his room and found his mother and father sitting on the couch next to each other looking at him awkwardly.  
“Right, I know you’re adults and you can make your own decisions, but I just want you to remember what happened last time,”  
“Hey,” It was his father, “I’m sorry about your friend,”  
“Thanks, I’m sorry your station is losing viewers to my show,” and with that he was out the door and into his car.  
The last thing he had wanted was to go back to that apartment, especially since it was just to check one thing, but asking his mother to do him a favour would have been harder than getting Hikari to have a rational conversation with him; and that was still years of growing indifference away.  
Takeru loved his car. Not only was it practical, it was quiet, and it was helping to save the Earth. It was an uncomplicated formula, unlike everything else in his life. A little bit of fossil fuel saved here, an organic food market attended there, a light turned off, a television not left on standby, and he was doing something that he’d been trying to do all through his childhood, only with less violence and against what, until very recently, he considered an even greater threat.  
He was saving the planet and it felt good.  
He couldn’t believe his parents were even thinking about getting back together again after the divorce; especially after everything that had happened last time they had tried to make it work.  
Takeru thought that he’d probably been a bit too harsh on his father, but Hikari’s snide comments had rubbed him the wrong way and then rubbed off on him. He didn’t like that he’d had to lie to her to get her to talk to him, but that was the price he had to pay for his mistakes.  
It wasn’t even his fault. Satomi was the one who’d shown the story to her father, and it all snowballed from there.  
Hikari really did hate him though.  
Despite everything, he didn’t quite understand what her problem was. But that was probably just because he didn’t understand women in general. It was largely why Satomi had broken up with him, he realised, because he just didn’t understand her. Two and a half years and he still had no clue as to what was going around in that pretty little head of hers. What had she said? _I’m not one of your female characters, you can’t just pretend you know what I’m thinking_. That was probably a good thing, considering the fact that he tried to write his female characters as if they were male, so that they didn’t end up being ‘The Innocent’ or ‘The Love Interest’ or ‘The Bitch’. They still somehow ended up that way though. It was ironic, he thought, that Satomi was so against being defined as just one of his female characters, when she’d progressed through each of those stereotypes since he had first met her.  
It was weird that he could think about her so objectively at a time when he was making such subjective decisions. All of this extra fuel, as minimal as his car’s usage was, being used up on a wild hunch.  
He parked his car a block away from his destination. The sun was well beneath the horizon and he put on the gloves he’d brought to keep his hands warm.  
He barely remembered living in Hikarigaoka, except for a few of the times he’d had with his brother and especially that infamous night out on the balcony. It wasn’t long after that that they’d been separated.  
He climbed the stairs and tried to look as inconspicuous as possible. It wasn’t easy with his impossibly blonde hair. He cursed himself for not bringing a hooded jacket or some sort of woollen hat but he couldn’t do anything about it now.  
He walked toward the door with trepidation. There was no crime scene tape like there always was on television, but maybe they’d already finished up and taken it down. He pulled out his pre-prepared pick cut out from a soft drink container. He might not remember much from back then, but he did remember that all the apartments on both sides of the street had pretty unsophisticated locks on their doors. It was one of the reasons that they had moved away after the split, but the house his mother had moved into was just as easy to get into without a key. The locks on the apartments in this area were easy to push open, if you could get something through the crack in the door and bend it just the right way.  
It took him just under a minute, and no one came past. Satomi was a good teacher.  
Once inside, Takeru searched. It was a long shot but maybe, just maybe, finding it would answer a few questions.  
What questions finding what he was looking for would bring up was another matter that he really didn’t want to think about right now.  
He took a cursory look around the kitchen-living-dining area, carefully opening the only cupboard that was big enough to hide it. Nothing.  
He checked the first bedroom. He saw the music system and realised that this must be where Hikari had found him. Strange that, he thought, how she could walk right up to him, lying there with a knife in his back and not notice it.  
A quick glance into the wardrobe proved fruitful. There it was, dusty as all hell and thankfully not connected to anything.  
He took it out and examined it. It was the same one alright.  
He studied it. What was Daisuke trying to achieve? Didn’t he know it was hopeless?  
He stopped himself; Daisuke had only ever given up on one thing in his life and that was only after over nine years of indifference on Hikari’s part. Nothing was hopeless in Daisuke’s mind. Besides Takeru knew all too well that Daisuke didn't know. But he was not going to think about _that_ if he could help it.  
There was a couple of scratch marks on the side and after a little bit of effort, Takeru managed to take off the affected panel.  
There was something inside that he certainly hadn’t put there. It was an xD card, a memory stick for a camera.  
He pocketed it and put the panel back on. He thought for a second before replacing what he had been searching for back in the wardrobe. If the police didn’t even think it was worth searching, then hopefully no one else would. It was safer here.  
Besides, if he walked out the door with it, it would look very suspicious indeed.  
He didn’t know what was on the xD card, but he did know that there was only one person who could’ve known what Daisuke was doing with the object he had stolen from Takeru’s house. He just didn’t like the conclusion he got when he added the fact to Daisuke’s murder.  
Takeru’s thoughts went off on this tangent as he began closing the door to the bedroom. The likely identity of the killer chilled him to his core. Seconds later when the vase came down on his head, and the figure who had just hit him with it stepped over him and into the bedroom, he stopped being scared at who he thought had done it, and became scared that he was about to do it again.  
He couldn’t move and his head was aching something fierce. He tried to think about something positive, if this were to be his last moment on the Earth, but all he could come up with was that it was ironic that he would die in the same apartment as Daisuke.  
It would have annoyed him to no end that that was an incorrect use of irony, had he not just had a vase cracked over his head.  
When the figure returned with part of the item Takeru had been searching for firmly grasped in two hands, and a heavily laden backpack which likely contained the rest, and stepped over him once more, it all but confirmed his initial fears.  
But when the figure didn’t stop to finish the job, Takeru was so surprised that he passed out.


	12. Make It Stop

I woke up. It happens every morning, so I didn’t quite know why I woke up surprised.  
I sniffed the air. Something was most definitely wrong.  
I threw on something a bit more presentable and ran to the kitchen. Mother was sitting down with a cup of tea reading a newspaper. That explained the smell.  
“Ken, you don’t have to cook breakfast, it is okay really,”  
“Please, it’s the least I could do, after all you did lend me your couch for the night,”  
“Should’ve given you Taichi’s bed, he didn’t turn up,” said mother as she flipped another page in the paper absently.  
“So are you going to talk to Miyako today or...” I didn’t want to pry, but after I’d heard what had happened last night I was really concerned about their relationship. I think they both knew that if it was just the ‘gay’ thing, they could work it out, but when one admits she fell pregnant to trap him into being faithful and the other practically accuses her of murdering his lover, it gets a little bit more complicated.  
He shook his head and laughed.  
“It’s weird, I had today all planned, I was going to take the afternoon off work and actually spend some time with her for once, but now I don’t know,”  
I could hardly believe it when he had called and said Miyako had kicked him out. Ken had always had a soothing effect on Miyako’s temper; she couldn’t fight with anyone if he was in the room let alone actually argue with him. And then when he told me what they’d fought about, well to be honest, I had almost thought he’d grown a sense of humour.  
“Breakfast’s up!”  
I sat down at the table next to mother as she thanked Ken for the food, but I was still thinking about Ken and Miyako. What if they never got back together, what would happen to the kid? I just couldn’t imagine Ken being able to live with himself knowing his kid was growing up somewhere without a father figure. But then, could he live with himself the rest of his life knowing he wasn’t being true to who he was? If I was this conflicted just thinking about it, I couldn’t imagine how much it was eating at Ken.  
I took a bite of the fried eggs in front of me.  
“Is something wrong with the eggs Hikari?” I hadn’t swallowed, something was different, I couldn’t quite place it; it was like there was something missing. I looked at my plate and the colour of the food atop it, it didn’t look right. I swallowed anyway.  
“How did you get it so yellow?”  
“Huh?”  
“I’ve never had anything from that frying pan that didn’t taste of charcoal, how did you...?” Mother poked her tongue out at me, and I waved it away playfully. Ken looked confused. “It’s delicious, don’t worry,”  
We sat in silence for a bit. When Ken had finished his eggs he thanked us once again and said he needed to get to work. We told him it was nothing, and I escorted him to the door. The poor guy.  
“You really should go see Miyako, Ken. I know it’s none of my business, but I mean, you are having a kid together, and–”  
“Two, Hikari, she’s having twins, we just haven’t got around to telling everyone yet,”  
“Well, great! Congratulations! But that’s all the more reason to sort things out with her, isn’t it”  
“I know, but I’m not sure I’ll be ready, or if she’ll even want to speak to me,” He thought for a second, “If I do, and she doesn’t, would it be alright if I...?”  
“Sure,”  
“I don’t want to impose its just, my parents live so far away now and–”  
“I know, it’s fine, just promise you’ll talk to her okay?”  
I watched him go and I thought as he went that as much as it was a surprise to me to find out that he and Daisuke swung the other way, and as much as the longer I thought about it the more sense it made; I really hoped he and Miyako could work things out.

* * *

“I thought you had to work today,” was what I said when I saw who was at the door not even half an hour after Ken had left and only about two minutes after mother had gone to meet her date or whatever. All I wanted to do was slam it in their faces.  
“Well, I’m letting events dissipate before I let them affect my style, can we come in? It is kind of important,” I looked from Takeru to Iori and then back. Things can always get worse.  
“What’s the runt doing here?” I said to Takeru spitefully and Iori was offended.  
“I thought we were cool,” I raised one eyebrow at him, then turned back to Takeru again and repeated the gesture only with slightly different expression.  
“He drove, his house was closest, and I was in no state,” he pointed to the matted maroon patch of hair on the side of his head. Bloodstains really do complete the ‘Hobo’ look.  
“You’re trying out a new style?” They were not amused, “Fine come in, bathroom’s through there, get cleaned up and we’ll talk,”  
“But it’s important; I need to show you now,”  
“Well, I can’t concentrate with that much blood hanging around, go,” I motioned violently with my thumb and he went. Iori came and sat down at the table.  
This stupid table. I was going to insist we get a new one if I was going to be continually interrogated over it.  
“Why aren’t we cool?”  
“What?” I didn’t really think Iori would care what I thought of him, he was odd and still a bit awkward, and this encounter was proving to be no exception.  
“I thought after I apologised you were okay and we were fine, is that not right?”  
“Oh,” I guess I wasn’t really all that mad at him, what he’d said seemed trivial compared to what had happened since, “I guess we are, I was just a bit thrown when I saw you guys at the door,”  
“I guess it doesn’t really matter if we’re cool or not though, I mean the world doesn’t revolve around you or anything,” I stared at him for a moment before commenting.  
“You’re one weird kid, Iori,”  
“Cool, is Taichi around?”  
“Um, no. Why?”  
“Just wondering.”  
The sounds of the ticking clock and running water seemed to echo in the silence.  
It got too much so I explained.  
“He’s probably hip deep in empty beer bottles in a dumpster outside some bar or something. I think mother and I are just about ready to give up on him,”  
“Taichi has an alcohol problem? That doesn’t sound like him.”  
“Father had one, and chances are at some point I’ll develop one too, it’s hereditary.”  
“What made him start, has something happened?” Iori confused me at the best of times, but surely he knew Sorato were away. I took a deep breath.  
“Separation anxiety, he can’t live with the fact that Sora’s on the other side of the world, I think he still loves her,”  
“And Yamato,”  
“Yes, Yamato’s over there as well, I guess he misses him too but that’s probably not the main reason he’s–”  
“No, I mean he’s probably still in love with Yamato as well,”  
I almost but not quite entirely had a total vocabulary failure.  
“Wh– Uh– Gah– What!”  
“Iori!” Takeru’s voice, but I wasn’t paying much attention. My brother; and Yamato! I could handle Ken and Daisuke but not this. My eyes widened as I realised that if it was true then Daisuke could really be a clone of Taichi.  
“Does she not know?”  
“Obviously, I thought I told you that was a secret,”  
“But she’s his sister, surely she would know, I thought,” Iori gathered up his thoughts which was more than I could do at the moment, mine were going places I didn’t want them to go, “Sorry Hikari, I didn’t mean to, I thought you knew,”  
I looked across at Takeru, whose hair was now back to that impossibly yellow shade of blonde that I used to love, and saw Yamato reflected back and images flashed through my brain of the rock star and the original gogglehead doing things that I didn’t ever want to think about them doing. And then I wasn’t thinking about them anymore and the images of Daisuke and Ken that I’d managed to not conjure up ever since I found out about their clandestine meetings, were conjured up and then I remembered that Daisuke was dead and suddenly the vision in my head took a more sinister turn.  
“Hikari, are you okay?” I wasn’t even sure who had asked, but it made the images disappear. At least for now anyway. “You’ve gone white,”  
“I’m…” I paused for a second to make sure that I really was fine, “I’m fine, it’s just a lot to take in, I mean first it was Daisuke and Ken and now Taichi and Yamato. I just–”  
“What about Daisuke and Ken?” asked Iori.  
“They weren’t, were they?” said Takeru who seemed to be answering his own question in his head even as he asked it.  
“Yes, but–” I started.  
“Figures, you don’t think that Miyako found out do you?” ventured Iori.  
“She knew, but–” This time Takeru cut me off.  
“I’m not sure what’s surprising you so much Hikari, it’s twenty-eleven, it’s not like homosexuality is taboo anymore,”  
“Takeru, it is still a shock when you find out that four people you always considered straight as arrows, three of whom you’ve known for two thirds of your life and the other you’ve known since birth, are actually not entirely heterosexual. I mean is there anyone I know who isn’t gay!”  
“Well, Iori has had a mad crush on me forever, but Jou and Koushiro are straight, I think, oh and me too, I can’t vouch for your boyfriend though.”  
Iori didn’t deny anything, but I wasn’t as surprised as I thought I should be. It seemed to make sense.  
“But, Yamato and Taichi?” I queried, “How would they keep that a secret from Sora?”  
“They didn’t,”  
“But aren’t Sora and Yamato...” I made air commas, “ ‘together’ at the moment?”  
Takeru sat down across from me and looked directly into my eyes, whilst placing my old camera on the table absently. I didn’t have time to ponder why he’d held onto it all these years because his next question confused me.  
“Have you ever bothered to listen to the lyrics of ‘Porianduri’?”  
“Yamato wrote it in English, and the lyrics are phonetically Japan-icised, it’s impossible to translate. Besides it only came out a couple of months ago, I haven’t really had the time to look,”  
“I forgot you didn’t do English at school, anyway even though I missed the last two years of school to follow my dream,” I was too intrigued to interrupt with a snide remark, “I know enough to understand most of it. The title literally translates to ‘one woman, two marriages’ or something similar but that isn’t really what the song describes,” He stopped.  
“And what does it actually describe?” He looked reluctant to answer but went on anyway.  
“It actually describes a relationship between three people who each love the other two equally, and of course we know who the woman and two men are,”  
“I thought it was supposed to be about a break-up?” this was Iori’s two yen’s worth. Takeru still looked uncomfortable explaining but he continued on.  
“It is, it is about how the singer and his girlfriend go about getting over the third party leaving because he’s in love with someone else,”  
I wanted to say that it couldn’t be right, that Taichi was not in love with anyone, but I realised that it explained everything. It explained why it took so long after Sorato started back up again for him to start getting all depressed about it. It could even explain where he’d disappeared to. Maybe whoever it was that he was head over heels for had given him an ‘in’. Maybe he was with her, (or him, I had to keep reminding myself) and maybe he wasn’t drinking himself to death right now. In spite of all the lies Taichi must have told, and in spite of the fact that finding out everything like this meant that I didn’t have his full trust and that I never had, and as much as that realisation cut me to the bone; in spite of all that, I felt slightly better about him than I had at the start of the day.  
Now there was a sliver of hope that he was okay.  
Takeru must have seen the little smile play on my face and realised I was okay, because he changed the subject rather abruptly.  
“So if you’re okay with all that, I think I know who killed Daisuke,”


	13. The Freshmen

All Takeru had had to add was one little sentence and I was back in his bedroom staring at the computer screen, staring at the face of an old foe.  
He had always said he would be back and now he was.  
I had asked Takeru at the time where he had obtained the computer from, but since I’d read the second half of his story I realised as the words left my mouth that it must have been the same one Ken had been transported through when he was young.  
We didn’t know why he was there, but it soon became apparent.  
He had come to gloat.  
He had come to thank us, for without the knowledge contained within Takeru’s masterpiece he never would have known the intrinsic link between the computer he was watching from that Ocean, and the world we had once fought so hard to protect. In fact, he noted that had it not been for some overzealous minion monitoring the strange anomaly that had adorned the cliff face in his prison since many moons before it had become so, the link between the two other worlds would have remained a mystery.  
He had told us he was staring into this anomaly now, and exactly what he would give to be able to pass through it and take the human world by force, well he would give the whole of the Digital World and the whole of the Dark Ocean. This was no exaggeration, he had told us, considering both were under his total command.  
The only thing he couldn’t fathom, he had told us, was why he couldn’t open up a portal to our world once he’d reached, let alone decided to conquer, the digital one. It hadn’t been long until he’d realised that it worked both ways, that if we were to break the seals that ‘the old man turned young’ and ‘his human sidekick’ had put up to stop the worlds from colliding and destroying the fabric of reality, he would be able to come through the tear. In short, there was nothing stopping him from taking it over.  
He told us of his alliance with the true master of the Ocean, and how easy it was to convince him to raise his army. They faced heavy opposition from our friends, but without our human spirit to strengthen them, they were no match.  
Takeru didn’t believe him.  
How much I would have given for Takeru not to verbalise his theory.  
The being on the other side of the screen, disappeared.  
In his place was a battle scene.  
It raged in all its horrid turmoil, and the being’s voice cut through the cacophony of attack cries to tell us to grab some popcorn, because the battle would be shown in full.  
Koushiro was the first to arrive. His computer nerd senses had told him there was a disturbance in the balance between the worlds, and he’d tracked it here. He’d contacted the others for help, and one by one they turned up to watch the slaughter.  
All except Jou and Daisuke.  
If the images weren’t bad enough, Daemon’s constant murmurings of how much he loved seeing hordes of valiant Digimon wiped out with every one of his attacks, or how seeing a Leomon rush in to attack, only to trip over a stone and impale itself on its own sword was ‘his favourite bit’, broke each and every one of us.  
The battle ended with legions of his and Dragomon’s army chasing the remaining Digimon into the distance. He appeared back on screen and asked us if we’d all had enough.  
I had.  
Then he told us there was more; that there was just one final question he had to ask.  
The screen switched to a cell holding all our partners.  
Each and every one of us cried out to them but he informed us that they couldn’t hear our pleas.  
Then he asked us if we would like to have the chance to fight him one last time. All it would take was for one little gate to open and for us to slip through and we would have a fighting chance at saving the world. He said he would enjoy defeating us and then taking the human world as his prize. The alternative, he informed us, was to watch as he personally destroyed each and every one of our partners.  
There really was no choice. Even without Jou and Daisuke we knew we could beat Daemon, especially with the help of the five older Digidestined present. If we worked together there was nothing we couldn’t do.  
Taichi was the first to pull out his device and we all followed suit.  
It was time to take the fight to the bad guy. Time to show him that the Digital World was protected, time to show what we were truly capable of. Did he not know of our exploits against Armageddemon? Even if he did he wouldn’t know how much stronger we knew we could be. He would stand no chance against the combined force of eight Mega level Digimon and a little anti-virus program we liked to call Omnimon.  
Then I saw Takeru wasn’t holding his device.  
I had asked him what was wrong and he had said not to do it.  
I didn’t understand why he would say such a thing.  
Daemon had picked up my Gato. He looked into her eyes and saw all the pain and suffering she’d had to endure under Myotismon and the defiance that burned inside her as she tried to hypnotise him to no avail with those infamous eyes. He decided there would be no point torturing her. She would have to be done quick.  
Takeru told me again not to open the gate.  
I looked from him to my Gato wondering if friendship was truly stronger than love.  
I made up my mind.  
“Gatomon Warp-Digivolve!” I yelled as Takeru flung himself in front of me to stop me from passing through had I opened the gate directly; but nothing happened.  
I yelled it again.  
Nothing happened again.  
“He’s already done it, it’s just another recording,” said Takeru as he picked himself off the floor but I wouldn’t listen, I couldn’t.  
Gatomon was crying, calling out for me to help.  
I hit my device on the table and yelled it out for a third time.  
Daemon disintegrated her.

The rest went slowly. The only thing I was thankful for in years to come was that I had been crying so much, that the horrors in front of my face were barely visible. But I could hear their screams as they lost arms, pelts, flowers, wings and fins, and their pleas for help haunt my very being to this day.  
But those pleas were nothing compared to the silence that enveloped them as they realised that we really weren’t coming. Agumon used the last of his energy to say “I thought you guys were our friends,” and I thought that I could not ever feel more totally devastated than at that moment; not only to see so many lives shattered, all broken and alone amongst friends, curling up into foetal positions and crying long after their tear ducts had dried up; but that I knew deep down in my very heart of hearts that it was all my fault simply because I had made the one I loved chase me.


	14. In The End

It didn’t take long for Takeru to put forward the first part of his theory. Daisuke was trying to figure out a way to get back. The presence of Takeru’s computer, which had previously been Ken’s and his brother’s before that, in Daisuke’s apartment all but confirmed it.  
“What made you think to check?” I asked, not wanting to take the thought process further just yet.  
“It was like Ken said, Daisuke would never give in, no matter what. I knew from Yamato that mother had been broken into, and you were there when the detective told us about the emails to various ‘programmers’, which was obviously just code for hackers, and I put two and two together. I asked Ken if Daisuke would have known about the significance of the computer and when he answered affirmative, one thing lead to another and I wound up with a vase cracked over my head,”  
We all knew where Takeru was going, there was only one person who could have known what Daisuke was trying to do. I didn’t want to ask. I would have been fine just thinking that the police would eventually find evidence and we could have nothing to do with it.  
But Iori asked instead.  
“So who knew?” We both looked at him for a second before he realised, “No, but he can’t have, where’s the proof?”  
Takeru took out the camera. My old camera. It had been state of the art nine years ago, but now it was a relic. It did however have memory card capabilities, and it was a memory card that Takeru pulled out of it.  
“I found this behind a side panel on the computer in Daisuke’s wardrobe,” he replaced it and turned the camera on, “it seems that Daisuke really was a stalker,” he handed me the camera and I looked at the photo on the screen. It was hard to make out on such a small screen, I had to squint but I could just make out the scene, “but he wasn’t stalking you.”  
There was a man hiding in the bushes, with a camera obscuring his face. But that was still enough for me to identify him. The next photo was taken from behind the man as he himself was taking a photo at the building that could be seen in front of him. There was only one light on in the building. I counted the floors. I counted the apartments across.  
I zoomed in even though I knew what must have been visible in the window.  
Grainy as the screen was I could make out what was going on in the window. It helped that I had seen the scene from this point of view just yesterday, printed and in full colour, at the end of the pile of photos the detective had shown me.  
“But they were on Daisuke’s email, how could…” I stopped myself and internally asked a question that had never occurred to me before. Why would they be saved to his email account and not his hard drive?  
“It was blackmail, a pretty sloppy attempt, but blackmail nonetheless. He must have been trying to convince Daisuke to stop and using the threat of harm to you, but when that didn’t work he did the only thing he could to protect us, and that was kill Daisuke,”  
I really wished I could be sarcastic and make some remark about how this was the real world and not one of Takeru’s stories, but it all made so much sense, and the evidence was right in front of me.  
“What about the phone? Why text me?”  
“Maybe he thought that if you were involved in the case somehow, you would be able to feed him information about what the police were looking for,”  
I remembered how he had comforted me and realised that it fit, it all fit, it had to be him. And to think I thought that he was the only one I could rely on.  
“We should go to the police,” It was Iori butting in again, I didn’t think it was possible but I was getting more annoyed with him at the moment than I was with Takeru. And I was always mad at Takeru.  
“No, we need to confront him.” Takeru agreed with me.  
“It could all just have a reasonable explanation.”  
“What if there isn’t? What if we are about to walk right into the lair of a murderer?” asked Iori.  
I went into Taichi’s room and after rummaging around for a couple of minutes returned with a blank tape and the cassette recorder.  
“Then we’ll get a confession,”

* * *

The ride over to Koushiro’s was quiet, and not just because of the unmanly amount of sound coming from under the Prius’ bonnet. We were trying to take our minds off what we were about to do.  
Accusing someone of murder didn’t happen every day.  
Iori had asked me as he drove about what I’d said earlier about Ken and Daisuke and I told him what had happened last night and what Ken had told me. When he asked why Ken had come over to mine and not his parents, I reminded him that Ken’s parents lived on the other side of town, and he had had work in the morning. The conversation had ended there.  
When we arrived at his block we parked next to his car. He was definitely here.  
I thought about what I was going to say to him. Would I be able to keep cool and get him to confess? Or would I just blurt it out and start yelling at him that even with the world at stake, Daisuke had been his friend and deserved better than a knife in the back? Would I even be able to look him in the eye?  
We reached his floor.  
What if his parents were home? What would we do then?  
Takeru knocked on the door and it swung open. The sound of classical music wafted through the opening. It wasn’t particularly loud, but it was enough for me to pause and let Takeru and Iori take their shoes off first. The music was getting louder as the two boys called out Koushiro’s name and stepped inside the house proper. As I removed my shoes, strangely I realised I knew the song from long ago, back when we were little and we still lived in Hikarigaoka, mother used to play it to us to try and give us a little bit of European culture. The music was horribly inappropriate for the situation and I felt a shiver down my spine as a drum crashed and the music once again became louder.  
As we walked through towards the door to Koushiro’s study the pace of the song quickened slightly and I froze. Takeru opened the door to the study and introduced himself. I couldn’t see what was happening because Iori was blocking my view, but when Takeru came out white as a sheet I knew we had got it all horribly wrong.  
The music continued building higher and louder, the instrumentalists becoming more frantic with their playing as I edged closer, feeling that I knew exactly what I would find once inside.  
Koushiro was slumped over his keyboard.  
This time the knife handle was clearly visible, silhouetted against his screensaver.  
I wasn’t sure if I was more shocked that he was dead or that his computer screensaver was a picture of me.

* * *

“Oh no! Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no!”  
“Calm down, Hikari!”  
“No I will not; you know what they’re going to think don’t you?”  
“It doesn’t take a genius; you should go,”  
“But, I’m on the freaking screen!”  
“It won’t be the same guy, we’ll cover for you. Besides, someone should remove his device so we don’t get asked awkward questions,”  
“Fine, is that it there Iori?”  
“Yeah, and I found this too,”  
“That’s not a pinePhone, he’s such a pineApple freak it can’t be his,”  
“Look at that last message,”  
“Shit, that’s the message I got from Daisuke,”  
“Iori, give it to her and Hikari get out of here, go home and wait for us to get back before you talk to anyone, okay.”  
“But, it doesn’t make sense!”  
“Hikari, you can think about it as much as you want once you’re gone but the longer we stand around here arguing over the body the worse it looks so just go,”

I didn’t know what to think and yet my mind raced. Everything spun and twisted inside my head until all that was left was those two last words.

I went.


	15. Creep

The man takes a look at the newspaper and succeeds in his mission to take none of it in.  
He practices using his peripheral vision and through it he checks for the thousandth time that she is still there. She is.  
She is still franticly searching through the phone in her hands. It is of no consequence. He hears the familiar chime and the voice cuts through announcing the next stop. The girl seems even more surprised than the last time. She must truly be distracted.  
That pleases him. This will be easy. Too easy.  
He stops his line of thought.  
He knows he can’t think like that, he might let his guard down. He flips a page for authenticity, but he knows he is invisible, a ghost. He even lets a smile play on his lips because he is that good, a master of the game.  
He has been watching her for a while now and he almost wishes that he could do this forever, but he knows that the ending is inevitable.  
The girl is too pretty to watch forever.  
It will be over soon.  
The girl’s interest is piqued by the announcement once again.  
He folds his paper and stands, daring to brush past her as she exits the train.  
After the exit he pauses and pretends to tie his laces out of sight.  
He stares at her body as she walks away from him hurriedly. He starts walking quickly in the same direction again, anything to get closer to that alluring figure.  
He takes a deep breath and slows his pace. He pretends to interest himself in a nearby map, casually putting some distance between himself and her. Careful.  
The view is slightly diminished from this far back, but no less pleasing.  
He continues following like always.  
He eventually reaches her apartment block and it saddens him to stop the pursuit.  
He waits, looking up at her residence and hoping against hope that she won’t give him a reason to end it.  
He sees something strange and unexpected.  
He smiles resignedly as he realises that the following is over.  
A shame yes, but what follows the pursuit is always much more fun.


	16. Little Sister

“What the hell are you doing?”  
I was surrounded by carnage and destruction. Pillows were all over the floor. Entire drawers had been ripped from their housings and their contents strewn across the entirety of the room. Socks hung from light fittings and posters hung at odd angles. And there I was amongst it all, on Taichi’s bed, contemplating life.  
And the other thing.  
“What the hell are you doing?” I shot back; a fine example of my famous witty comebacks.  
Taichi looked down at his foot which had stopped in mid-air as he had reacted to the scene in front of his eyes as he had attempted to sneak into the house from the balcony. He placed his foot down and looked back at me, and at what I was cradling.  
“No, you first.”  
If it had been any other time I would’ve torn strips off him and yelled questions about how he managed to get to our balcony on the fifth floor without entering through the front door. I would have let him have it for not being there for his sister when she had so clearly needed support.  
But not now.  
“He’s gone,” is all I said, and interested myself in what I was holding.  
Taichi came over, almost tripping over an old CD player that I’d thrown to the ground earlier. He sat down next to me on the bed and took the bottle from my reluctant hands.  
“This was full last time I checked,”  
“I drank it,”  
“I can see that, but why?”  
“I think he loved me,”  
“Of course he did Hikari, that’s why he left isn’t it?”  
“Not him, not Daisuke,”  
“Who then, who’s gone?”  
“Koushiro,” He took a couple of seconds to digest it.  
“And he’s...?”  
“Murdered. Knife to the back. Just like Daisuke.”  
Taichi drained the rest of the bottle.  
He asked how I knew.  
I told him what had happened.  
“Okay,” he paused, trying to hold back whatever was racing through his mind, “so why does that mean you get to drink all of my twelve year old whiskey,”  
“I’ve been thinking about the Ocean a lot. What happened, how he was the one who made it impossible for us to get back, how he’d made sure we were still the only ones who knew about it all, how now with him gone there is no way we could get back even if there was a there to go back to, but also how much I wish I’d just let the Ocean take me before and all this pain and suffering I’ve gone through would never have happened. Is that wrong? To want to forget so bad, that you wish a past on everyone you care about worse than the past that has already happened,”  
“No, what’s wrong is your choice of liquor,”  
“Huh?”  
He got up and motioned for me to follow him out towards the balcony.  
I followed, gingerly.  
“Scotch Whiskey makes you depressed,” He climbed onto the ledge and jumped over the small gap between our balcony and our neighbours’, “You need tequila to make you forget. Come on I’ve done this loads of times, much more drunk than you are right now,”  
“Why can’t you just bring the tequila to me?”  
“Can you imagine what mother would say if she found you in the state you’re in? You need somewhere to pass out, and I know just he place,”  
I was too far gone to argue any more. I’d tried. Wasn’t that enough?  
Taichi helped me over the first gap, and the next. Before I knew it we were in some stranger’s living room, each with a bottle of tequila that he had pulled from a very loudly clinking backpack.  
“Whose place is this?”  
“The Matsuada’s, they only use this apartment at New Year’s,”  
I wasn’t sure if it was delayed vertigo or the alcohol but my head spun as I took my first swig of tequila. Taichi asked if I wanted a chaser, but I was past the point where my tastebuds had any say in what went down my throat.  
As we drank, I told him about the messages on Daisuke’s phone from Koushiro. Koushiro had sent him the email address and password and from time to time would make a threat via his personally encrypted phone and direct Daisuke to check the email for a high resolution image, just to let him know how close he could get to me without anyone noticing. After Daisuke reverse stalked him and he found out it was Koushiro, he flipped the blackmail back onto him and the threats stopped. Koushiro, changed tack completely and started appealing to him not to open the gate for the good of humanity, this was the part where he admitted that he was deeply and madly in love with me and that he never would have harmed me. He said that since he had the pictures he thought he could use them to his advantage, since he was so desperate for Daisuke not to go back, but from what I could tell Daisuke wasn’t having a bar of it. I still couldn’t explain how Koushiro managed to get Daisuke’s phone, I was pretty sure it meant that he had tried to steal the computer and found him dead, seen the phone and taken it instead of the computer to stop the police finding out.  
Or at least that was what I tried to tell Taichi. The amount of detail I managed to impart in my state was up for debate, but I think I remember getting the main points in.  
I remember we talked about less serious stuff after that, you know, brother/sister nostalgia and teasing without all the bullshit we’d been heaping on each other recently. Somewhere near the end of our bottles the conversation went back to Daisuke and I remember happily saying how stupid I’d been choosing Takeru over him.  
Taichi said something about how Daisuke must have really loved me to let me have the space to choose Takeru.  
I said something about how stupid it was that Koushiro had liked me all this time and I never knew because if I had back then when Takeru and Daisuke were locking horns I might have just gone and run away from them both and into Koushiro’s arms.  
Taichi remarked that they were all good guys and that it was a shame they had had to die.  
This brought me down a bit, remembering that they weren’t among the living, and I slumped on my brother’s shoulder and grabbed his hand for support. I looked up at him and asked why they all had to fall in love with me and he kissed me on the forehead before saying that I made it impossible not to.  
He added that he wished he could’ve protected me from all of this, he wished I’d never got that text.  
I said that he sounded like Daisuke when he was drunk and gave him a cheeky kiss on the cheek before saying that at least I still had my loving brother, who I still loved despite the fact he never told me about his relationship with Sorato, which I was totally open minded about and okay with. That was what I said anyway.  
He said it didn’t matter now because it was all over, he couldn’t go back there. He asked if I was really okay with everything I’d found out about Koushiro and Daisuke and I told him that if I’d known about how Daisuke was trying to go back and how Koushiro was stalking me, I probably would’ve killed them myself.  
Exaggeration is a bitch.  
Because Taichi said he had done so, so that I wouldn’t find out and get hurt. And then he kissed me passionately on the lips. I closed my eyes for a moment and imagined that it was Daisuke.  
It was a damned good kiss.  
But then I pushed him away. No, he couldn’t have just done that. He was my brother! The murk shifted for a moment and I realised just who it was that he had left Sorato for, and oh God did he just admit to murder?  
The door flew open and someone shouted something but I wasn’t listening, I couldn’t.  
Taichi said something to me and I just stared at him and said yes. He kissed me again in the same place and jumped off the couch and ran to the balcony as I finished my sentence with ‘of course; you’re my brother,’ but the man from the doorway spoke over the top of me for Taichi to stop and he didn’t hear.  
Taichi was at the balcony door now and throwing it open as the man from the doorway passed me as I stood up from the couch and followed them groggily.  
I saw that Taichi had cleared the first gap by the time I was outside but the man was catching up, even as he called furiously into a communicator something that I don’t remember.  
Taichi reached the next gap and looked back and slipped.  
I remember calling out his name.  
And from then I don’t remember a thing.


	17. No Secrets

My head pounded, my mouth was dry, I could hear my heartbeat and it hurt my head.  
I couldn’t quite figure out why.  
I thought for a moment and it hurt some more.  
I’d been drinking, that was it, but I didn’t remember getting into a bed. From the general feel of things I was still dressed, which was a plus. There wasn’t a strange presence next to me in bed either, which was also a plus.  
I opened my eyes, and was blinded by the light, so I shut them again.  
Hello there again darkness.  
I lay like that for a moment, revelling in the simplicity of silence and lack of light. The symbolism escaped me.  
A name drifted through my head as I tried not to think about anything and just enjoy the nothingness.  
The name was Taichi.  
Taichi.  
I let it float around for a bit, it was a nice name, a strong-but-gentle name, my brother’s name.  
I love my brother, I thought happily, and my brother loves me.  
Something about that last bit made my head hurt more.  
My brother loves me, I thought again.  
It hurt again.  
Realisation hit. Hard. Oh God my brother loves me.  
And he slipped off the balcony.  
Oh God, “Taichi!” I yelled as I sat bolt upright opened my eyes to find that this was not my beautiful bedroom. The walls were fuzzy but they were definitely a darker colour than my room and the bed wasn’t in the right place, and where the hell was I?  
“So Sleeping Beauty awakens without the kiss of Prince Charming, do you want a drink? Some aspirin?”  
I looked toward the door but the light was brighter over there despite the vertically imposing figure in the doorway. I couldn’t quite make out who it was, it looked a bit like Jou, but it sounded nothing like him.  
“Who are- what am I doing- where am I?” was all I got out before he moved closer and I could make out the soft features and flowing locks. I was still confused.  
“Ken and your ex brought you here last night, you were drifting in and out of consciousness and you had me really worried,” he handed me the glass of water and I drank gratefully, “but not half as worried as I was after I found out about what happened,”  
I asked Ichiro what they had said and how they knew what happened.  
“Blondie was waiting to talk to you about something, and Ken said he was supposed to be crashing at yours, but since there was no one home they were chilling outside your door when some undercover cop busted into your neighbour’s place and came out with your brother in handcuffs.”  
“So he’s okay! Thank God,” I breathed a sigh of relief before, screwing my face up as I tried to remember.  
“Well, if you count being in jail for murder as okay, sure,”  
“No, but he slipped, he was about to fall, I thought...” I paused as I tried to remember how close the detective was to my brother when he tripped, he had made up a lot of ground, could he have got there in time? “I thought he’d gone off, and, you know. Away,” Ichiro put an arm around me, and continued in his soothing tone.  
“Well they saw him come out alive, so there’s no need to worry,”  
"But how did the guy know he'd done it?"  
"Not sure, but I found this in your pocket," he showed me something small that I could barely see, "it's a listening device, so your brother must have said something incriminating enough to get him arrested,"  
I closed my eyes and leant into him some more. He was very comfortable.  
We sat like that for a short while. I was thankful for the silence, but thankful that I was here, in his arms, safe and secure, even if I was severely hung-over. Mother most certainly would not have been pleased to see me like this.  
I looked up at him, as I always did, as I always had to, and saw him deep in thought. Did this mean we were back together? I didn’t know, but I didn’t need to bring it up, our status was of no consequence at all. He was there for me and that was all that mattered.  
I wondered what he was thinking about. Was he worried that he might have been able to prevent this? Was he scared that he’d been too harsh, too aloof when he’d told me he had some things to take care of? Or was he thinking about them now, wondering if he should open up and bring me into whatever troubles he was having? That was probably it, but I knew there was still something between us stopping him from being entirely honest with me, and I knew exactly what it was. As much as the silence was soothing my headache I knew I had to break it.  
“Hey,” I said, the words sounding far off and alien in the din of soundlessness around us, “I think...” I trailed off. What did I think? Where should I start? “I think you deserve to know,”  
“Know what exactly?”  
“Everything, my story, my life, then maybe if you can get past that you’ll understand when I tell you what I’ve been going through the past few days,”  
He didn’t look at me, still lost in thought, thinking, always thinking. Then he turned to me and spoke.  
“I think it’s you who deserves the confession, not me,” I raised an eyebrow but let him continue, “You see, I’ve been waiting a long time for this moment and I’ve come to realise over that time that it’s not fair on you to confess without me coming clean first,” his hands were shaking, something that I had never seen before, he was always so confident, so sure of himself, it wasn’t like him at all to be nervous, “I knew from the moment I saw you that you were the one for me. I know they say not to judge a book by its cover, but sometimes you just know. I knew, and... I know.”  
I wasn’t sure where he was going with this, but maybe that was the hangover stopping me from thinking terribly clearly. He saw the look on my face and continued.  
“I don’t mean at the baseball game, I saw you long before that, eight years ago, on the net,” I couldn’t believe what he was saying, it was impossible. “You and the blonde one, saving the world with your little friends, you were just so... beautiful, determined, perfect... eight years and I still can’t describe it with mere words,”  
“But how can you, Koushiro made everyone forget, the codes in the wi-fi, stuffing with brain wave patterns, you could only remember if...”  
“If you had experienced ‘a profound emotional connection’, that’s what I had Hikari, you were my shining light. For years I thought I was mad because no one else remembered and then you sat next to me at the game and I knew it was fate, not madness that had shaped my life up until that point,”  
My mind was spinning and it hurt. And not just from last night.  
I asked exactly how much he knew, and he told me.  
He gave me the lot.  
Hikarigaoka.  
The first summer.  
The war online.  
The second chapter.  
The return of the online threat (which by all accounts he had witnessed first-hand).  
And the true and tragic end, as complete as I could bear.  
It took him a long time, making sure I knew exactly how much he knew, including my relationships with Daisuke and ‘The Blonde One’ as he so perfectly referred to Takeru as. He even made sure that I knew that he knew our partners were just that: partners and friends, not pets, not mindless fighting machines, but real with personality and soul.  
By the time he had finished my headache remained, but I’d been shocked into thinking more clearly. This severely cut down what I needed to tell him and I wasn’t quite sure what I felt about him knowing and keeping quiet about it all this time, but that wasn’t at the forefront of my mind.  
Because just like the dog in the night-time, just like Takeru’s idiotic story, it was what he didn’t say that gave it all away.  
Images and secrets filled my head for the first time since that fateful day three years ago, of the true atrocities that Daemon committed. All the things we swore we would never reveal to those not there.  
As all that came back I had but one question to ask of the man next to me.  
“Where’s the computer?”

* * *

Ichiro had some more explaining to do, and he did. Just as I had gathered, Daisuke had hired him to do what Koushiro said could not be done, to find a way through the dimensions, without tearing holes in the spatial continuum. Ichiro went over the details about how he’d extracted the relevant code by removing everything that should have been there, and extrapolated a simulation of its workings onto a laptop, thus removing any danger of actually breaking through Koushiro’s barrier as he experimented.  
He would go over to Daisuke’s apartment every so often to report his progress and to gather more data from the source, over time they built up a trust and soon they both knew about each other’s past and current affections toward me. So when Koushiro began trying to blackmail Daisuke into abandoning his plot to re-enter the other world, it was easy for Ichiro to provide a spectacle of us that no self-respecting stalker could pass up, and Daisuke was able to snap the incriminating photo and they could get back on with their work.  
I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt that he’d used me, but honestly, I haven’t had a better night’s sex than that night we did it with the lights on up against the windows in his apartment, and I’m fairly certain Ichiro hasn’t either.  
Of course, when Daisuke was found dead, Ichiro assumed that the threat was much greater and more sinister than Koushiro, and so he pushed me away in case they came after him as well, not knowing that I was probably suspect number one at the time. He waited a couple of days before making a run for the computer, and ran into Takeru looking for the same thing.  
I felt a swell of pride when I realised that he must have been the one to crack the vase over Takeru’s head. When he said he felt sorry, and I told him not to be, he narrowed his eyes at me and I told him that it could wait.  
I asked him why Daisuke wanted to go back, and he said that he was going to round everyone up, find our friends, and take the world back from the forces that had escaped the Dark Ocean; wasn’t it obvious?  
I hesitated and he continued.  
He’d almost cracked it; there was just a few things he needed to tweak involving Daisuke’s device and its portal opening capabilities and in theory we should all be able to travel through without damaging the barrier and giving Daemon a weakness to exploit in order to travel through to the real world.  
Again I hesitated, but this time I asked why Daisuke had chosen now. Ichiro honestly didn’t know. Maybe he just felt the time was right, maybe it was just because he finally had enough money to finance such a high quality hacker, the only thing he was sure of was that it wasn’t a ploy to get me back, Daisuke wanted to make up for not being there three years ago and that was all Ichiro could gather.  
He asked me if I was ready to tell him all that had happened over the last few days, and I thought back to Miyako’s comment from a few days ago, that honesty was the pillar of a good relationship. And because she and Ken hadn’t been honest with each other, they and their children looked like they were going to be ruined for the rest of their lives.  
I started by explaining why I hated Takeru, and then I launched into the last few days, being honest about the reasons I went over to Daisuke’s given such little incentive, even though I couldn’t for the life of me remember what Ichiro and I had been fighting about before that day. I told him about how I’d almost started thinking Koushiro would be my saviour, and how I realised that I could have loved him, and that I still loved Daisuke, and I also told him just how low I got when he broke up with me. I told him how I spiralled into despair after we found Koushiro’s body, and left no detail out that I knew of in relation to my brother’s behaviour the night before, and just who I had been thinking about when he kissed me. I didn’t even know if it meant anything. I hoped it didn’t, and I told him that.  
Ichiro took it well, he didn’t blame me for being mad at him, and it was only natural for Daisuke to come to mind considering just how much I’d been forced to think about him recently. What he was more interested in was what I thought about Taichi, and I realised that I hadn’t really had much time to process that whole scenario. I said that I didn’t know if I wanted to believe that he had killed the other two for me, or whether I wanted to believe that he’d lied about it, and I wasn’t quite sure which was worse. Either way, I had to accept that he had feelings for me that I just couldn’t ever reciprocate, and that I would live the rest of my life knowing that he was an extremely good kisser and knowing the reason why I knew it.  
We were quiet for a while after all of that heavy discussion. My headache was going away, despite the thoughts and admissions I was having and having to make.  
Ichiro eventually asked me something that he admitted he probably should have asked months ago. Did I actually want him to open the gate?  
I thought about it, and all I said was no. I thought about the attack on Priory Village, again. The regenerated eggs of our friends being destroyed before they could hatch, life gone before it could start again, the memory that shocked us all so much that we could never even tell Jou or Daisuke about it; I remembered and this time I burst out crying.  
Ichiro asked what was wrong, and I told him that it had all been for nothing. Evil had won. All that was left was a memory, and no one would ever know.  
He said I was wrong, and left the room.  
When he returned I saw what was in his hands and wanted to hurt him. I wanted to throw the object in his hands on the ground and jump on the little tiny pieces until there was nothing left. But I was just too emotionally wrecked to move. It had all caught up with me.  
He said despite what I thought, we still had this, everyone did.  
He put it in the player and I watched, objecting inwardly. I heard the same music come through the speakers as had been playing last night when I found Koushiro. Ravel’s Bolero.  
They had really made it true to Takeru’s story. That was what mother had been playing to us that week before our lives were all turned upside down forever.  
I watched the pilot. And then I watched the first episode to see if it was just as good. It was. It was even better than what he had written. Beautiful.  
But I had seen enough.  
I thought about the falsified ending, and for the first time I thought I understood. A metaphor.  
I made a call to a number that wasn’t in my contacts list anymore, but had called me just a few days ago, a number I thought I would never call again. I only said two words, but that was all I needed to say.  
“I’m sorry,”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun Fact: When I first uploaded this in 2013, this was the end of the story.  
> Personally, I still think it holds up as a 'What if Digimon Adventure, but no Digimon and it's a murder-mystery?' kind of thing.  
> Clearly though, I wasn't done with the story...


	18. Avant Gardener

The girl walked along the street. Alone? Yes. But she was not cold. Her head was not filled with anxious thoughts of the future, for the term held no meaning for her anymore. All was nothing and nothing was all. She was not meeting anyone; at least, that was not the purpose of her meandering. Although, she thought with a rare quarter-smirk in which just the slightest hint of the corner of one-side of her mouth twitched upwards, that would imply that she actually had a purpose for walking the streets of Odaiba in this indifferent weather. It would also imply, she thought even more cynically, that there was a purpose to anything. She ran her gaze over the people around her, wrapped up in their own little worlds, shackled to their phones, slaves to the ever increasing digital age and for what? This was merely a single moment, in another every single one of them was dead and in another, not even their ancestors had been born or even thought of. And that was just this reality.  
She flicked away her thoughts as she flicked at her strangely blonde hair. She had lost her hair ties mysteriously in her journey and now it was falling across her face in ways that reminded her why she preferred it tied up in the first place. Maybe she would be meeting someone, she decided, and maybe they would give her some hair ties.  
This thought pleased the girl as she wandered so she clutched it tight, held it dear and thought of nothing else as her form drifted indeterminately.

* * *

Before long, or after short, the girl came upon a cemetery as she invariably did in what she loathed to call her travels. She did not like this one. Shrine upon shrine littered the overall plot haphazardly, an affront to the dignity that was supposed to be afforded those passed on. She came across a boy, or a man, or both, or neither, and watched as he presented a bunch of flowers to a face in a frame.  
“For staying away so long,” he said as he placed them down and knelt.  
The girl ghosted in behind him and gazed at the boy in the photo. Glasses, unruly purple mop and devilish smile: the face was much younger than the form that sat before it, but somehow she felt that the face was older than the form.  
“I’ve been so busy…” he started as the girl noticed the rings of blue around the flower stems, “it’s no excuse but events have got me thinking and, I…” he trailed off again, “Everything I love dies, horribly, and I just…” the pauses were starting to annoy the girl, she really wanted to ask about the flowers, “it’s like now that I have an out, I’m just going to not take my chance to get back in again, because I can’t bear the thought of…”  
The girl could not see the tears forming in the figure’s eyes, but she could sense their presence and realised with something akin to dismay that now was probably not the best time to be asking after a pair of rubber bands. She crept away from the mourning figure.  
“I know you’re there,” intoned the voice from in front of the shrine, as the form from which it emanated, rose and turned to face her. The girl froze. “Oh, you’re just a…” he trailed off, not wanting to sound disrespectful.  
“Just a what?” she said without malice.  
“You’re only a child, I thought…” but what he thought seemed to be forgotten as a look of suspicion and confusion swept his face, as the girl gathered her being to defend herself.  
 _Only a child!_ She thought indignantly.  
“How did you…” he started, but lost the words.  
“How did I what?” she replied, dropping her head towards her shoulder quizzically. She really was getting quite bored with his inability to verbalise his sentences properly.  
“I don’t know… you did it,” he said, and she sighed.  
“And what, exactly did I do?”  
“I’m not sure, you didn’t get… shorter, you were already slightly shorter than me. Tall. I thought you looked tall, and now, without anything really obvious happening, you… don’t seem like you’re taller than you should be?” She furrowed her brow, even to her ears this sounded wildly esoteric. “Maybe I’m remembering wrong, but now, it’s like the skin on your face looks tighter, your clothes hug your body more and seem more age-appropriate, and those ridiculous bangs are finer and somehow less kempt… and yet none of that makes any sense, and now I’m entirely certain that I’m going insane because I swear you didn’t look my age half a minute ago,”  
“You did have tears in your eyes,” the girl said calmly, “are you sure your perception was not disturbed by the bending and blurring of the light?”  
She saw the pensive look on his face and decided that now might be a better moment than the one she had passed up previously. She stepped past him and picked up the flowers from the shrine.  
“Do you mind if I take these?”  
“Yes I do actually,” came the thoroughly confused reply, “they’re for my brother,"  
“Oh,” she said, removed the rubber bands and dropped them next to the face in the frame. “An odd gift,”  
“No, the flowers not the…”  
“Oh, so you do not mind if I…” she swapped the bands with the flowers, placing the latter gently in position and the former around her fingers. She pulled and combed at her hair furiously on one side.  
“You’re odd,”  
“I just have a unique perspective on life,” she said offhandedly as the first blue band was snapped into place, “my grandfather is a dolphin,”  
“Okay…” the girls hands started work on the other side.  
“Dolphins are smarter than you humans you know, that’s why they called him Dolphin,”  
“So that would be his name then, he isn’t actually…” the second band was in place but from what the girl could feel, she had not done it right. She took it off and started again.  
“Not physically, but then physically I am not a rabbit, and yet since the rabbits are smarter than dolphins, I was named after a rabbit,” the girl’s hands stopped moving as she paused mid-ramble, “or was it a mouse?”  
“No, I was wrong, you’re insane,” the hands started up again.  
“No, I was right, it was a rabbit,” the band snapped into place, “I followed one.” She checked her hair again and, satisfied that she had everything nice and ordered once again, held out a hand to be shaken, “I am–”  
But there was not a hand anywhere in sight.  
The purple-haired boy was gone and she had a strange feeling that something bad was going to happen. It was a feeling she had had before and she knew that the feeling was as close to fact as possible. It was telling her not to turn around.  
But the figure she had been talking to was now behind her, and if she did not turn now she would never know what the ill omen was about. And she had never liked not knowing.  
Her mind made up in an instant, the girl pivoted, her black dress twirling perfectly on its axis, and she glimpsed another figure sauntering over towards them.  
This new figure was visually different to the other. He wore off-trend clothes without the style of those adorning her current companion; whose hair was a silken dark purplish colour as opposed to the matted yellow thatch on the new guy.  
There was one other thing that separated the two figures and it was breathtaking. To the girl, the neat stylish figure she had been talking to looked completely normal, but when she looked upon the new figure she saw reality shift and twist around him. Light appeared to bend and fracture near him, and time seemed to stop and speed up concurrently until it had no meaning. It was like a film burning out whilst it was still in the projector, only the crackling and warping was endless and entrancing. She saw pasts and futures erased and replaced over and over in the ghastly halo of world ripping sunspots emanating from and being drawn inexorably into him. It was as if the multiplicity of reality itself was itself pivoting around the figure, and in that instant the epiphanic vision overwhelmed her, pulling her in and pushing her away until only black and numbness remained.

* * *

The first the girl realised she had passed out was when she noticed that the conversation going on around her in the blackness had been going for a while.  
“I don’t care, I’m not putting my hands anywhere near an unconscious girl that I don’t know, even if, no, especially if she’s mentally disturbed,”  
The next thing she heard came from a more familiar voice, albeit more panicky and direct than she had heard it last.  
“Well then get to a phone booth and call an ambulance, because she’s clearly not going to…”  
She sat up, but still she saw black. She realised that this must be because her eyes were still closed, but she did not open them for fear the sight of the golden haired boy would send her back into oblivion.  
“You lost someone,” she said, surprising even herself.  
There was silence, and then a couple of inaudible whispers before the unfamiliar voice; the one she assumed belonged to the boy with the aura of a supernova replied.  
“Yes, we both did, two someone’s in fact, what’s your–”  
“Not you,” she interrupted, “the kind one, he lost someone,”  
More silence.  
“Yes that was his grave I was…”  
“No that boy lost you and in the fullness of time you will be returned to him, I am not talking about death, but rather displacement,”  
“You’re right, she is disturbed, I wonder what facility–” but he was cut off again, this time by the kind one.  
“You’re not… you don’t know of… not Ryo?”  
“I know not his name, but I knew him, or at least I will, or I…” she opened her eyes and furrowed her brow but it did not help. She wondered where this was all coming from. Did she not have somewhere important she had to be? It nagged at the front of her mind  
“Well? What do you know?” It was a good question. She knew a lot of things.  
She told them.


	19. What You Gonna Do?

Detective Hideki Suzuki looked at the unconscious lump of filth that had its head lying down on his pristine interview table and gave a sigh. It takes a special kind of hedonist to murder two of his friends in order to protect his own sister from mere ‘emotional damage’. The fact that he all but confessed that he was sexually attracted to and madly in love with that same sister not only added to the contempt the detective had for the sack of scum, but it actually scared him a little that there were people out there whose minds actually twisted so far from the sane.  
He gave the dog a kick and yelled at him to wake up for good measure, and obligingly the mass of unkempt hair rose and a couple of bleary eyes peered up at him.  
His first utterance was the name of his sister, Hikari. The detective had had a couple of meetings with the young lady and felt it prudent to remind him that the fine young woman would want nothing to do with him, and that he should be more concerned with his own welfare at the present.  
The boy insisted that she was in danger and that if he did not get out of there soon, so would the whole of Tokyo be.  
Just as he suspected, the boy was clearly mentally disturbed. He was scrabbling at his manacles and searching about for an escape route. The detective decided to remind him of the seriousness of his situation, and his rights. He reminded him that he was under arrest for one count of trespass, and two counts of premeditated homicide, and that if he did not want to spend the complete entirety of the rest of his life behind bars, that he should probably cooperate.  
The hair turned to him and stayed still in realisation, as the boy gave a wicked, knowing smile and said, much calmer now, that the detective was going to have to let him walk out of here, scot free.  
The detective was amused, and humoured him by asking him to go on and explain just why he was going to let someone who had confessed to two murders simply walk free.  
The boy said that it was simple. The confession for the two murders was clearly obtained illegally, as it could have only been obtained through surveillance of his sister in a purely speculative fashion, as for the trespass, he added offhandedly that a simple phone call to the Matsuadas would confirm that he had their permission to use that apartment.  
The detective took all this in, for a drunk the speed of his deductions was remarkable. He had to remain calm, and not let the boy know that he had rattled him.  
The detective countered that there was still motive, and opportunity, to which the boy replied that his supposed motive was so flimsy a judge would not even allow a case to go to trial based on it.  
The detective pulled out the phone records and pointed to a text sent from the second victim to him on the day of the first murder which indicated that the suspect should go and make sure the first victim did not do anything stupid. Hideki then proceeded to ask whether he thought that evidence would be enough, but as soon as he had done it he regretted it, for he now realised that he had been outsmarted by a drunken oaf, or, as he now saw him, a highly functioning sociopath with a high tolerance for alcohol. The sociopath laughed at him and then instead of mocking him, he got angry.  
He told the detective just what he thought of his half-arsed attempts at crime solving; how he did not care how backed up on cases they were that they thought the murder of two of his dearest friends could be so loosely handled by such an incompetent egotist who had the gall to think that such underhanded practices such as eavesdropping on a vulnerable young woman could amount to actual detective work; and finally that if the detective held him here any longer, he and the city could expect to receive some high level false imprisonment charges from his father.  
The detective’s head spun, where had it all gone wrong? He had never had this problem before, criminals usually knew so little about the law that he could get them to confess to anything based off any shred of evidence. But this impossible little hoodlum had come in to his interrogation room, passed out on his table for a full day, then spurted forth all that hatred and disgust, and he expected to get away with it? In a flash the detective was upon him, fist clenched around a section of the boy’s shirt and knuckles under his chin, dragging him up out of the chair and pulling his dopey face to within millimetres of his own irate expression.  
“Listen here you little…”  
“Stand down Detective Suzuki,” The detective heard through the intercom, but he was too enraged to heed the warning. If this kid was going to make him loose this job, he was going to make him pay for it. “Hideki!”  
He threw the offending scumbag at the wall behind him with all the force he could muster. The chair went flying, the hair flew back, and whipped forward as his manacled wrists kept him locked to the table and sent his body hurtling towards the ground face first.  
The detective was slightly distracted by the twelve-hundred volts coursing through his body from his superior’s Taser, but he swore that he saw both of the kid’s shoulders dislocate before they both collapsed to the ground in agony.

* * *

A short, balding man in a crisp blue pinstriped suit with a boring maroon tie, was holding up a small evidence bag to a mass of hair in skinny jeans and t-shirt with the logo of some hip local band that was making it big States-side.  
“Here you are sir, two sets of keys, a wallet containing exactly one thousand yen, a stick of chewing gum, and a pinePhone,”  
“Thanks,” said the mass of hair unappreciatively.  
“If you could just sign here to say that you’ve received everything we took from you…”  
“Is the last thirty-six hours in there as well?” Despite the venom in his voice, the man with the hair began to sign, he needed to get out of here.  
“Like I said before, the Tokyo Police Department does not condone the methods of officers Matsui and Suzuki, and full and proper investigations into their actions and, of course, your friends’ murders are already underway. I personally assure you that…”  
“Save it for someone who cares,” was all the hair had to say to the Inspector as he left the balding man’s office and started looking through his phone, making his way back towards the reception area angrily. His faith in the police’s ability to find and catch this particular killer was so low that you would actually have to dig underground to find a trace of it. How deep, and exactly what you would find when you reached the appropriate depth would have to wait, because his musings were at that moment interrupted by the sounds of an almost lyrical guitar riff emanating from the evidence bag.  
Confused, he fished out his phone whilst doing a quick time-zone calculation in his head. If it was about midday here, over there it must be about midnight, he thought. His next thought was that that could not possibly be right and he promptly gave up.  
He answered with the traditional greeting and waited.  
“Why’re you answering like you don’t know who it is, Taichi? I know you have ‘Porianduri’ as your custom ringtone for us; why’s nobody home?”  
“Hikari’ll be at her boyfriend’s and Mother’s out, I guess. How d’you know there’s no one home?”  
“We’ve been knocking on the door for a whole minute; now let us in already would you!”  
“I’m not in either…”  
“Well where are you?”  
The hair was so busy processing the fact that Sorato were in Tokyo, that his own location slipped from his lips before he could stop himself.  
“Huh?”  
“Look, I’ll be there in five to ten minutes okay, just stay put, alright,”  
There was a muted discussion on the other end of the line.  
“Actually, we’ll come pick you up,”


	20. Zombie

The sunlight streamed in through the window and on to my face like a balm. The disgust I felt over the events of the past six days seemed to be drawn out of me by the sun’s rays and for just a moment I was almost content. I was running away, and maybe that was best.  
Ichiro was out getting supplies for the week ahead. If I was going to be staying with him for a while we would need food, and I would eventually need to go home and collect some clothes. But for now, my jeans and Ichiro’s shirts would suffice. Home was not where I wanted to be right now. Home reminded me of Taichi, and thoughts of Taichi lead into darkness, despair and disgust. It was not just that he had so completely betrayed my trust; it was the fact that I was now second guessing the whole of our childhood together. When had he realised he was like that? Was it something to do with the whole Sorato situation, or were his involvements with his closest friends over the years just lies to cover up a deviant secret?  
I was not coming to terms with any of this, the lies, the murder, or even the deaths.  
Daisuke and Koushiro were no more, they had ceased to be and despite all the stupid mixed up emotions that still crashed around in my head about the both of them, I could not help but feel slightly responsible. Many scenarios were thrown around against the walls in my head for exactly why Daisuke had decided to try to ‘go back’ as it were, but the only ones that seemed to make any sense involved some sort of redemption for leaving everyone behind three years ago, or a play for my affections – which, to my mind at the moment, either meant that this was all either because I had inadvertently forced him to leave town, or because I had lead him on for so long whilst Takeru and I were still not admitting our feelings for each other.  
Takeru.  
Just because I had realised that my hatred for him was an irrational way to stop me from hating myself, did not mean I could let it go that easily. Urgh, the nerve of the bastard – just because I had apologised he suddenly thought it was a good idea to come over and discuss exactly what my apology meant. I had told him that I finally understood the end of his story, and he had acted all weird, said that the ending was just wish fulfilment but that he would love to hear my interpretation as well when he came over. It had taken every ounce of courage I possessed not to tell him he was being a presumptuous ass, and to instead set a time.  
I looked at the clock on Ichiro’s laptop, which I had just booted up out of boredom, and realised that Takeru was, unusually, late. It figured, now that I was starting to tolerate him again, that he would start to take that good will for granted.  
I checked my emails and social media, but it was just more of the same inane things that I had skipped over just a few days ago. Looking at all the vaguely familiar faces and all the vaguely familiar topics of apparent interest to me, I felt my melancholy swell. If you wanted proof that life and death were meaningless, all you had to do was log on to the internet after a trauma and see that everyone else was still living their life exactly the same as before. To the populous, the subtraction of one life was nothing. The human race endured, and quite frankly, it did not care.  
Thankfully, my train of thought was interrupted by the familiar chime of a Skype call coming through, and I had clicked on the icon at the bottom of the screen before I realised that, since it was Ichiro’s laptop, it was his Skype that I was now technically snooping on.  
My fingers danced inexpertly on the track pad, searching for the cross in the upper right of the screen, when suddenly a voice emanated from the speakers, but it only completed half of the traditional greeting before cutting out. I had not managed to close the window myself, but in my haste I must have answered the call by accident. The girl, for it was definitely a female voice I had heard, must have seen me through the built in webcam, realised I was not Ichiro and disconnected.  
I heard a knock at the door, but I ignored it in favour of snooping on the display picture for the mystery caller. The door could only be Takeru, anyway.  
Sadly though, it was only a white background with simple black Roman characters that possibly read something like ARI:KE, but then that was based on my very limited ability at reading English, and that was assuming the text was not one of those other European languages that used the same character set. Regardless, even if I had translated it right, I wouldn’t have known what it meant. It could be a meaningful phrase, a name, or even an unimaginative logo for some brand.  
The knocking continued and I figured I had left Takeru out there long enough. A twinge of paranoid superstition came upon me as I approached the door, and hesitating because of it, I checked through the peephole for a shock of blond.  
I got what I was looking for, fixed my face into an expression of disdain and annoyance and opened up, only to find an interestingly dressed young woman with tarty blonde pigtails and an identical expression on her own, suspiciously attractive, features.  
I had a burning desire to ask her as venomously as possible the most painfully obvious question: ‘Who the shit are you?’ but before I could do so, she pitched forward and face-planted firmly on the entrance room floor. She was unconscious before she hit the ground.

* * *

As she lay there, motionless, all I could think about was that if this was one of Ichiro’s friends there must be a pretty important reason for him to keep her secret from me. I was not a jealous person, at least I didn’t think I was, but I could not help but wonder if that reason was because he thought I would be jealous of her looks, or worse, that I had every reason to be.  
I did go to the kitchen and grab some aspirin, a glass of water and some ice for the inevitable headache and bruising from her fall, so I felt a little better about myself for a moment. But then I felt terrible about feeling good about thinking of myself and assuming the worst of my boyfriend before thinking of the unconscious girl on the floor, and settled back into my newfound comfortable state of self-loathing.  
I had returned to the entrance with my gifts, but the girl was not there. She was on the futon with Ichiro’s laptop. Her face, I noted with a hint of disappointment, looked perfectly fine.  
“What are you doing?” I asked, too torn between being angry, curious or scared to put any inflection on the question.  
“Figuring out who is piggybacking my code,”  
“So you’re a–” I was so relieved I made air commas with the icepack and glass of water, “ ‘programmer’ too then?”  
“No more than a writer of autobiographies,” she didn’t look up at my confused face, but instead asked, “Can you help me?”  
“I’ve got ice and aspirin if you’re still feeling the effects of –”  
“No, I mean with this, I am accessing the piggybacker’s webcam and microphone and I would like a basic opinion on this person’s intentions, so I can better determine whether I should help them or not, because from the sloppy way they are trying to access it, they need it bad.” She got up and connected the laptop to the television, effortlessly locating the correct cable and the port on both Ichiro’s television and his laptop, not even glancing to check their location or orientation and just shoving them in.  
I tried to act naturally, though at this point I was not even sure what that was.  
“So how well do you know my boyfriend?” I asked as she expertly navigated the menu on the television.  
“Oh, I helped him on a thing once; made sure his logic was 100% and fixed his proxy to run with real input and output as opposed to the complex, imaginary-numbered system he was working with…” she had lost me at ‘proxy’ but even then what she was saying did not sound like the usual hacker mumbo-jumbo I heard from Ichiro, “got it,” she said suddenly. She looked from me to the computer a couple of times before asking, “do you know this mop of hair? You have similar bone structure, though he lacks the lightning storm that seems to be hanging around your shoulders.”  
The words were Japanese, but they were such an unusual assortment that before my intuition could kick in and tell me that I did not want to look at the screen, I looked towards the screen that she had turned towards me.  
It was a picture of my brother with Sora, and only once the shock of seeing his face and all the horrid thoughts and memories that I now attached to it wore off, did I begin to wonder how the girl had managed to find a picture of them as if taken from the viewpoint of the computer that Taichi seemed to be working on. Clearly, it was taken some months ago, considering Taichi had stopped hanging around with Sora and Yamato before they went off to America, but there was something off-putting about the whole scene. It was something to do with how she sat on the edge of her bed, not at all at ease in her own room.  
There was something else too, but before I could define it, the girl had turned the screen back and started typing feverishly.  
“Hey, I was looking at–” I started, before a familiar, sisterly voice put a freeze on my mind.  
 _“And you’re saying she was the one off her face, not you?”_  
It suddenly struck me that Taichi was wearing the same shirt depicting the logo of Yamato’s band that he had been wearing two nights ago. A strange coincidence.  
I gasped as I heard his voice. He sounded tired.  
 _“Well, considering what she’d found out…”_  
And Sora’s attire in the picture was uncharacteristically Western, almost like she was preparing for her big trip.  
 _“And what she’d seen! If Daisuke wasn’t enough of a shock, to then find Koushiro too, I can’t imagine what she’s going through,”_  
I felt the colour drain from my face as I realised that what had unnerved me about the photo was that the curtains were moving. That and the fact that Taichi had not bought the shirt until after the band had left for North America because he did not want Yamato to know about it.  
The reality set in.  
“He’s… out?”


	21. Time Bomb

Takeru drove off from in front of Miyako’s building having just dropped Ken off.  
“If what that girl says is true, then I want to be by Miyako’s side,” he had said and asked to be taken there if it was not too much trouble. Takeru had been hosting Ken ever since they had pulled a heavily intoxicated Hikari away from her neighbour’s apartment, but not once had any of his requests ever seemed like too much trouble. If Takeru had been feeling particularly poetic, he might have described Ken as a person whose damaged soul bled through their words such that whoever heard his requests was compelled to accept out of a duty to not damage it further, but today was not a day for poetry.  
“Don’t you want to find him?” Takeru had replied, “If he’s here, he’d want to see you,”  
“Wherever that Ryo boy goes, chaos follows. The last time I saw him he had defeated Koushiro, Wallace, Mimi, Yamato, and Taichi in a tournament and was on a floating island in the digital world, about to take on the evolved form of the apparently indestructible digimon that stuck a dark spore in me. They said that when he finally faced up to his foe the island exploded with no survivors, but about a year after the world had registered him as dead and the others had forgotten all about their little tournament, his parents also disappeared. I couldn’t explain it, but I knew he had come for them somehow, and that he was out there somewhere with them, fighting battles that we couldn’t begin to comprehend…”  
“So if he is back, why don’t you want to see him?”  
“Because he won’t have come back for me, he will have come back because the greatest battle is here, and if that’s the case there’s nothing we can do to help but let him get on with it… I mean, what could we do? We’ve been useless in these matters for years, it’s best to hold our loved ones close and put our faith in the impossible boy…”  
He had not heard Ken talk with such certainty about such wild things before, but there was clearly no arguing with him.   
Takeru turned his thoughts to his destination, Hikari’s, or rather Ichiro’s since that was where she was holed up, and wondered whether he should mention any of this to her. Was it important that there was another destined running around? Not with Koushiro and Daisuke dead, he reasoned, though now that he thought about it, if Ryo still had his partner with whom they had defeated indestructible foes… No, that was something he could not begin to think about and there was no way he was bringing it up with Hikari, because she would think the same thing.  
Hope was the last thing she needed.  
What she needed right now was to learn to live with the past few days. From her apology he figured she must be over the whole ‘blaming him in lieu of blaming herself’ thing, but whether that was because the horrific events of the past week were so fresh in her mind and were blocking out past atrocities or she genuinely felt sorry for the way she had been treating him, was something he felt she needed to explore.  
He was about to start thinking about his plan of attack, when he was rudely interrupted by a call on his mobile phone. He crossed three lanes of traffic to pull over but the phone rang off just as he was about to answer. He saw the number was listed as ‘BITCH’ and immediately regretted pulling over. He was just about to pull out from the curb when Satomi called again.  
He answered with the traditional greeting and waited for the inevitable barrage.  
“Where are you?! Why aren’t you working on this new season?! Is this some petty little thing because we’re not together anymore?! You promised us an outline five days ago! Where is it?”  
“Just…” he sighed, he really did not want to deal with this right now, “calm down for a second, okay,”  
“Calm down! Takeru, Daddy’s threatening to demote me if I can’t get you to put out for us. He says you’re a once in a lifetime acquisition and that if I’ve managed to lose you just because of a stupid break-up–”  
“Satomi, your father isn’t going to do anything to his golden girl and you know it, so cut it out, alright? I’m in Tokyo dealing with some personal things right now, and I’d rather–”  
“Who is she?”   
“It’s not…” he began, before changing his mind in a fit of irritation, “Urgh, fine! Two of my friends are dead, but I’ve got time to give you a complete fifty-episode synopsis, sure…” It was weak, he knew, using personal tragedy to try to get out of something he had been procrastinating over for months, but he still had no idea what he was going to write about.  
“Oh Takeru I’m sorry, I didn’t know…” for a moment he thought he had gotten away with it, before she continued, “maybe just a general overview?”  
There was nothing to do but make something up right there and then. He thought back to what Ken said about Ryo not being able to escape conflict and thought that was as good a place to start as any. Hell, if he ever ran into him he might even be able to steal his story and put off having to create his own characters for another year.   
“Okay, well it’ll be about that guy we saw for two seconds in that season two flashback, and a whole new cast,” he paused to see if she would accept just that, but when she remained silent he realised he was going to have to keep digging himself deeper, “and it’ll be darker, dealing with depression and mental illness and all that, since you were so upset there was so little of the Dark Ocean last season…”  
This seemed to appease her.  
“Great, Daddy’s going to love this! I’ll get him to give you some more time, okay?”  
“Thanks Satomi, I appreciate it,”  
“And if you feel you need to talk to somebody… I mean, I know I broke up with you and everything, but we’re still friends right?”  
He said goodbye and hung up. Man she frustrated him.   
In the beginning he’d thought she was an enigma, a free spirit whose whims were all part of some glorious plan. Then she had discovered his writing and they began to think of themselves as a burgeoning power couple, their love for each other intensified by the way they were furthering each other’s careers. Then one day he had told her she was the luckiest person he knew and she had taken it the wrong way, like he was suggesting she had not earned her place in the industry and it had all spiralled out of control from there. He realised then that what he saw in her was warped by his need to feel accepted and loved by someone, anyone, who was not Hikari and now that her mask was removed, all he could see was a selfish, manipulative little rich girl with nothing better to do than toy with people for fun.  
And now she was basically his boss.  
Shit, and Hikari thought she had it tough.  
Thinking of Hikari made him realise he was late and that he should get moving. He had just indicated to re-enter the traffic when he received a text from Yamato asking him to come around for dinner if he was still in town.  
Takeru smiled as he pulled away from the curb. Regardless of the horrific reasons why; with Sorato back in town, maybe today was not going to turn out so bad after all.


	22. The Less I Knoe The Better

I could not believe it. After what he did, he was out in the world, sitting there chatting casually to Sora in her and Yamato’s apartment. Did she know that everything about him was a lie, that he was not the cool and caring guy that he pretended to be? Did she know that he might have killed two people?  
I thought back to the last time I saw her, five days ago on Skype, thought back to how she had changed the subject when I brought up Taichi and the uncomfortable little readjustment in her seat as I brought up his drinking. There was not much that Sora was uncomfortable about nowadays, not even being in a relationship with two people at once apparently, but revealing to a close friend that her brother was probably drinking so much because he was in love with his little sister would definitely come under that tiny cocktail umbrella.  
Suddenly I felt a wave of ice run through my veins. Who cared if she did not know he had been arrested for murder and that she could be in danger, when she failed to warn me that he thought of me as more than just his sister?  
The strange girl had put the video feed up on the television screen while she typed away and from her explanation to me I could tell that she was in some kind of technical discussion with Taichi and that he needed her code to bypass something but after that it just went straight over my head. All I had learned from his verbal conversation with Sora was that they had come back from America after Takeru had sent a message through to them when we found Koushiro, and that Yamato was in the shower trying to get over his jet lag. She now knew that he had been arrested, but he had told her that the confession he had made to me was a lie to get me to back off of trying to solve the murders myself. I would have believed him too if it actually made any sense. Sure, if he had not been arrested I probably would have ended up passed out at the Matsuada’s for a day or two, and maybe it would have meant that he could have done whatever he was trying to do now on one of Sorato’s laptops and solved it all himself before I could come to. But surely that could have been achieved without confessing to murder, and certainly without kissing me – a fact he deigned too trivial to share with Sora.  
The sound of a key in the door signalled Ichiro’s imminent arrival with the groceries and, I noted happily, some packed lunches from our favourite bento place. He smiled at me and then looked to the strange girl.  
“Alice, how’re you…?” His dark, soul-piercing eyes flicked to me and then back to her, “Uh… How are you, I haven’t seen you…?”  
“No, you haven’t. Come and look at this,”  
He looked up at the big screen, “Oh, he’s out, I didn’t think that confession would hold up,”  
“Excuse me? You expected him to get out?” I said, flabbergasted.  
“Oh, yeah, completely illegal the way they put that listening device on you, I’d like to say it was understaffing, but it’s probably more overstaffing, cops going rogue to get promoted over the rest of them…” he came over and gave me my lunch. I could tell he wanted to reach down and give me a greeting kiss but I turned my head down towards my food as I thanked him. I was not ready just yet.  
He put a comforting hand on my shoulder instead and went over to this Alice girl at the computer. He was definitely a bit weirded out by her presence, but he was doing his best to roll with the situation.  
“I found this guy trying to hack my code,” reiterated the monotone girl from behind me, “he actually has most of it right, but he’s trying to build the code as a type of anti-firewall, when what he should be doing is…”  
“Hikari,” said Ichiro tentatively, “you did tell her we can’t trust him didn’t you?”  
“I said I trusted him as far as I could throw him,” I replied, thoroughly confused.  
“If you were in the vacuum of space you could throw him lightyears away, or if you were near a crack in reality you could send him dimensions away. You must trust this man completely,”  
“What!? No! What are you–” I protested to the girl before Ichiro cut me out of the conversation.  
“Alice, what did you tell him?”  
“That he was limiting his mind to the trivial case where the base code is only universal, but he was not even working with that. Amateur,”  
Ichiro looked like he was going to faint.  
“Alice, that’s not trivial, universal base code could allow him to–”  
“That is nothing you were not trying to do, I am not sure what–”  
“But I was just simulating, this guy’s…” he actually facepalmed, “look, I’m going to go over there and try to put a stop to this, do you know where they are?” he said, turning to me.  
“Sorato’s apartment, you remember we went there for their big going away–” but again he cut me off.  
“Yep, got it,”  
In his haste to leave he paused only to grab a vase of plastic flowers from atop the shoe cupboard.

* * *

As the apartment began to fill with empty keystrokes, it seemed that there was nothing else for me to do while I ate, but watch this strange girl type, or watch my even stranger brother do the same.  
I decided instead to watch Sora watch my brother type, but after what seemed like seconds of her mouthing things at the back of his head like ‘Nice to see you Sora, you look good for someone who’s just flown halfway around the world,’ and then replying inaudibly, ‘Oh, thanks, you look terrible after a day and a half in a prison cell, what the hell are you doing?’ ‘Just big important male technology things, you wouldn’t understand’; I became just as bored as she looked. I was so bored I was actually wondering when Takeru was going to get here and we could sit down and talk about our feelings or whatever he was expecting us to talk about, but thankfully for both of us Taichi spun his chair around to face her, exclaiming that it would have to do.  
“What will do?” said Sora rather hastily, as a poor attempt to hide the fact that she had been in the middle of mouthing some expletive in his direction.  
“Before he died, Koushiro asked me to follow up on something, said that he was concerned that what he was looking into was more sinister than we all thought–”  
(I thought I heard a muttering of: “ _Well, he’s not lying there…_ ” over the frantic keystrokes behind me, but I ignored it)  
“And I’ve just set up something which should allow me to get in and tell if he was right,”  
“So what was he looking into?” asked Sora, whose interest, like mine, had been piqued.  
“It’s better I don’t say, I don’t really want to put you in danger if it turns out he was right,”  
“Taichi, how long have you known me? Have I ever needed protecting? Have I ever not been able to handle whatever is thrown at me?”  
“Well you didn’t seem to be able to handle the fact that I bought you a hairclip for your birthday, and I mean, come on, that wasn’t much – ow!” he said as he defended himself from a flying pillow attack, but Sora had half a smile on her face.  
“You know what I mean!”  
“Can you blame me for wanting to protect you though, after all we’ve been through?”  
“But you…” she looked away from him, like she was hurt, before turning back determined to not let him get to her, “You left us, remember? You said you didn’t want us anymore, that it wasn’t where your heart lay. You can’t use that as an excuse to leave and then pull this white knight routine, that’s not how it works,”  
“You’re right, I did say that I didn’t want you two anymore, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t want _us_ ,” Now it was Taichi’s turn to look away, as Sora stared at him with incredulity.  
I had a thought cross my mind of how much better this would have been had Ichiro brought me popcorn for lunch instead of my favourite lunch-box, but shook it away as Taichi continued, “I thought for a while that I could go along with it, I convinced myself that I could win you over, steal you away, but it was never going to happen,”  
“Don’t you dare try to pass off what we all had as just some ploy! I was there, you looked at him just the same as you looked at me. We were in love together, not separately,” the truth of her words seemed to have an effect on him, because a look of triumph passed across her face before he spoke again.  
“Okay fine, I’ll admit there was a time when I was equally enthralled with both of you, and I would have done anything either of you asked, and I did, and I enjoyed it, all of it, but don’t for one second get all high and mighty about the fact that _I_ wasn’t being honest about what I wanted out of the relationship, when all you two wanted was someone to sneak around on,”  
“That’s not… I…” She was back to looking away now, and he had taken a step towards her, but the malice in his voice was fading.  
“How has he treated you since I left? I bet he’s not been around much, busy writing, recording and gigging hasn’t he? Strange isn’t it, that after I left you two still manage to spend less time together, even though you’ve been living without the third wheel…” he was sitting beside her now as she stared off into the middle distance, trying to rationalise it all.  
“Of course it’s been hard, we’ve been getting over the break-up, it’s not easy…”  
“But I think our relationship made him realise something, didn’t it? Something that he wouldn’t admit even to himself – that he was only in love with you because he knew I wanted you. He realised that it was me he really wanted, that’s why he was always so quick to anger when I annoyed him, just like you are sometimes, because it frustrates him to have these feelings for someone so flawed and male.”  
“But he was in a relationship with you, and me, what does the fact that you’re male have to do with anything?”  
“Think about it, who knew we were all together? Takeru walked in on us that one time, but we made him swear not to tell anyone, because it was more fun keeping it a secret,”  
I almost laughed at this, considering it was Iori who told me about it, but I was too engrossed.  
“But he wrote that song…”  
“In English, so it would be harder for people to find out what he was singing about, hell, he even put the lyrics up in hiragana so that they looked like gibberish. These aren’t the actions of a man who is comfortable with who he is,” Sora was still staring off to the side, her mind whirring, things clicking and jarring, overwhelming her.  
“I don’t believe it, how could he… we’ve been together for years, I…” Taichi put an arm around her shoulder and pulled her towards him.  
“See, it’s always been this way, I’ve always loved you and he’s always loved me, even though he would never admit it to himself. But you… you’ve always loved us both for the imperfect beings that we are. But when that love isn’t returned it kills you. Literally, you shrink and withdraw and it’s not healthy. When I left, emotionally, so did he. You know you are the only one left in the relationship, but you won’t leave him, because how could you? Not when he’s dealing with something so earth-shattering and not when that would leave you with no other options.  
“So here I am, giving you an option. You don’t have to be with him anymore, you can give him some space, let him figure out who he is by himself,” Maybe it was the jet-lag, but Sora almost looked ready to agree with his flimsy argument, almost ready to usher in the dawn of a new ‘Soraichi’- no that didn’t sound right… maybe a new ‘Taiora’ era, but as she lifted her face up toward his to reply, a harsh voice cut through the moment.  
“And that’s just what you’d like isn’t it?”  
Sora composed herself and looked offscreen to where I assumed her boyfriend was standing.  
“Yamato, is it true?”  
“What? Of course not, he’s just trying to take you away from me, he’s sick.” But from the way Sora looked at my brother knowingly, she did not believe him. Yamato turned his attention on Taichi, “We fly halfway around the world, pick you up from the police station even though we’ve only just got here, and all I have to do is turn my back for one second…”  
“Actually, you’ve been in the shower for about half an hour,” said Taichi, standing up confrontationally as he did so, forcing Yamato to take a step forwards to accept his unspoken challenge, which meant that he was finally in picture and I could see that he was wearing nothing except a towel around his waist. I could not help but stare as he ignored the interruption.  
“FOR ONE SECOND, and you try and convince this girl that I’ve been going out with since senior high that I’m some sort of fool for the Great and Perfect Taichi Yagami!”  
Sora stood up too, “Don’t call me ‘this girl’ while I’m right here Yamato! Besides he’s right, you have been distant ever since he–” but neither Taichi nor Yamato were listening.  
“So you admit it then, I was just a plaything to spice up your relationship, and nothing more,” cut in Taichi, daring him to contradict what he just said and prove what he had been saying to Sora was true.  
But Yamato did not reply with his mouth.  
He replied with his fist.  
Sora told him to calm down, that maybe they all needed to.  
But Taichi just grinned at him.  
“See, he’s punching back because he knows he can’t talk his way out, he can’t argue against the truth,”  
“Actually I can’t argue with someone who is intent on using blatant lies to manipulate people,” Yamato had a smile on his face now, “Whatever happened to the Taichi who said he was never going to drink huh? Never touched the stuff while we were together, but as soon as you leave us you turn right into your father,”  
It was Taichi’s turn to hit back now, and I almost couldn’t blame him. There was a reason mother was back on the dating scene.  
Sora turned her attention to my brother to try and get him to calm down, but she had not seen how much damage he had done to Yamato’s face. Yamato ran at him, pushing him into the wall as Taichi swung at his head with his fists, eventually pushing Yamato off of him and across to the other side of the room. Sora’s pleas became more vociferous as she stepped between the two of them. Taichi stopped and confronted her.  
“I saw you two, one night when soccer training was cancelled, and I heard you telling him that it was wrong, that you two couldn’t keep doing what you were doing,” the looks on their faces told me that he had them, there was no denying it, “and then you kept going.”  
He pushed Sora onto the bed dismissively and took another swing at Yamato. But he was ready for it. He dodged the fist and planted a knee into Taichi’s groin, his towel miraculously staying put.  
The knee did not seem to have the desired effect because Taichi immediately followed up with an elbow to the back of Yamato’s head which sent him sprawling to the ground again.  
Sora was on her feet trying to restrain my brother, but he was laser-focused on Yamato and he threw her back onto the bed, harder this time. A gasp escaped my lips as her head audibly smacked the headboard.  
Yamato had recovered and came at him with what looked like everything. Fists flew at Taichi’s face, chest and stomach, but something was wrong. Taichi was just letting Yamato hit him, taking each punch and relishing the rage Yamato was showing.  
I saw Sora come to on the bed, and could tell that she thought her eyes were deceiving her too. Taichi should have crumpled by now.  
He began goading Yamato, telling him he punched like a girl and calling him a wimp, among other more hypocritical things. Yamato kept coming at him but all it took was for Yamato to pause as a moment of doubt crept into his mind, and Taichi pounced.  
Left jab to the stomach, causing Yamato to double over.  
Right uppercut to the jaw followed up with an elbow to the side of the head as he fell.  
Sora screamed a scream which I had only heard once before. A scream I’d only heard on the worst day of our lives.  
But strangely, Taichi was not paying attention to her.  
It was almost as if he was looking directly through the screen at me, as if he knew I was watching him.  
Without breaking what I was struggling to describe as anything but eye-contact with me, he raised his foot in the air and brought it down with more ferocity and speed than I had ever seen, contacting something solid and wet.  
I had never heard the sound of shoe on skull before but now I will never be able to forget it.  
Through my tears, I could see that Taichi was still boring a hole into my head with his raging, inhuman eyes. His voice when he spoke was so unfamiliar, touched with more malice than I thought he was capable. He smiled a wicked grin at me as his words stabbed through the disbelieving protestations coming from the bed.  
“Do you hate me yet?” He looked over at the bed for a moment and turned back with an even bigger smile, “You will soon,” and then he began his menacing approach.  
I closed my eyes. This was not something I wanted to see.  
Sora yelled at him to get away. _He must be right above her now,_ I thought.  
There were some strangely quick pounding noises. _Oh God, he really is…_  
A crash and the noises stopped. _Something’s fallen off the bedside table and it’s distracted him…_  
I waited for the pounding to start up again, but instead Sora cried out. _He’s torturing her, he’s broken something and he’s cutting into her with it…_  
There was a thump and some more cries from Sora, followed by a couple of shushes and a whisper of “It’s okay, he can’t hurt you now,”

I opened my eyes, and there was Taichi, unconscious and awkwardly shoved between the wall and the bed upon which a physically unharmed Sora sat crying in the arms of Ichiro, her saviour.


	23. Bring Me To Life

I was numb.  
Three years ago I had had to deal with witnessing the deaths of our friends and partners at the hands of Daemon and it had broken me. I had blamed myself, I had blamed Takeru, but that was only for allowing it to happen, there was still a part of me deep down who knew that the real villain was the one we thought we had already vanquished.   
But now, I had witnessed first-hand the brutal murder of one of the most recognisable faces in Japan, by the most recognisable face to me. My brother.  
I closed my eyes to try to wish it all away, but it was all I could see. He was still there in my mind, glaring at me, enjoying my pain as his raised foot descended, as if the entire point of what he was doing was because of me.  
What had we done to deserve this? Any of it? What sins were we all guilty of that warranted this level of punishment? And why Taichi? Why did it have to be Taichi?  
I watched dumbfounded as Ichiro escorted Sora away from the scene. He returned shortly after and rummaged around under the bed until he found a pair of handcuffs. As I tried not to imagine the previous uses for the ’cuffs, Ichiro dragged my still unconscious brother over to the table where the laptop was, and latched him to it. He whispered into the microphone for me to stay put until he could calm Sora down, before exiting once more.  
I was not in the mood to argue.  
I just about jumped out of my skin when the front door opened up and revealed the last person I wanted to see.   
Takeru.  
“Hey what is she…?” I wasn’t even the first person in the room he noticed, “Hikari what’s the matter?”  
I was audibly sobbing now as he approached me.  
How could I begin to explain what I was feeling?   
It was his brother lying dead. His brother who he cherished and adored. His brother who he had worked so hard to have a relationship with after they were separated as children.  
And it was my brother who had killed him.  
And he had no clue.  
I held his stare for just a moment until I could not take it any longer. I embraced him and started full on crying into his shoulder.  
“I… I’m s– sorry… I’m so, so sorry… Takeru, I…” but I could not bring myself to say anything but ‘sorry’ and even that felt inadequate.  
“Hey, it’s fine I’m not mad, I understand, it’s okay…”  
Oh god he still thought I was apologising for how I’d been treating him.  
“No, no, no, no, no…” I told his shoulder, “I’m sorry… so, sorry…”  
“Hikari…”  
And then I heard another voice, in just as much distress as I was from the other side of the prefecture, screaming out in pain.  
“No! … not Yamato, no!”  
At the mention of his brother’s name Takeru turned towards the television before I could stop him. I stopped to look as well but all that was visible was the top of my brother’s giant mop of hair as he tried to scrabble over towards where Yamato lay, below the line of sight of the laptop’s camera.  
“Hikari, what’s going on…” asked a thoroughly confused Takeru, but words continued to fail me.   
I heard a disturbance somewhere off screen and soon after Sora burst back into the room, furious.  
“What the hell do you mean, ‘Not Yamato’!?” She was standing over him, tears still visible on her cheeks, “Look at what you did!”  
Taichi started telling her to not get angry and Sora started blurting obscenities at him, but Takeru had seen enough. With a look of panicked despair on his face and an explanation that he had to go, he rushed out the door.  
I was alone again.  
But Taichi and Sora had been joined by Ichiro who was trying unsuccessfully to remove Sora from the situation.  
“This is not what you need to be doing right now,” said Ichiro soothingly.  
“Why do you get a say?” She turned her attention to Ichiro, “You’re just some guy that Hikari doesn’t even like. Why are you even here?”  
If Ichiro was hurt by what Sora was saying, he did not let it show on his face, but before he could reply, the sound of a lid being unscrewed distracted Sora.  
“Hey, leave my sake alone, you bastard,”  
“Just calm down alright, lemme have some of this–” said Taichi before Sora snatched the bottle out of his hands.  
“Calm down?! Twenty minutes ago you…” she looked over at Yamato fleetingly, “and then you were about to…” she looked down at her shaking hands as Taichi spoke up.  
“Hey, you don’t know how much I needed that!”  
“Are you serious Taichi?! You heard what I was saying but your main concern is the alcohol!?”  
“I need it to keep you safe, he doesn’t like it when–”  
“You’re handcuffed to a table, I think I’m safe enough as it is,” said Sora dismissively.  
But Ichiro had heard the same thing that I had.  
“I’m sorry, ‘he’?”  
Sora wasn’t listening, she was drinking from the bottle, something I’d only ever seen her do after she had already had a few.  
“Besides after everything you’ve done, you should be the one afraid of me.”  
“Sora, you’ve got to believe me when I say that that wasn’t me, I would never…”  
“Never what? You did it, I’m still struggling to believe it but you did, and it has destroyed almost every meaningful aspect of my life. I don’t know who you thought you were talking to before, but let me make it very clear that I hate you.” She got right up in his face as he backed away, the level of pain and anger on her face mirrored by the fear on his. “In the space of twenty minutes you made me want to leave my boyfriend for you and then you made me wish you’d never been born,” She raised the sake bottle menacingly, “And when I’m through with you, you’re going to wish it too,”  
With a movement too quick for Ichiro to stop, Sora smashed the sake bottle over the side of her desk. It exploded in a shower of glass and alcohol, covering all three of them. Taichi copped most of it in his hair and Sora had turned her head away, but Ichiro had been in the process of trying to stop her breaking it and was looking directly at the bottle when it shattered.  
Ichiro disappeared off screen clutching his eye, but Sora was more surprised that she was holding just the neck of the bottle and looked down at it, confused.  
Taichi began telling them that they had to get away from him, that they weren’t safe here anymore. But Sora took it personally. She yelled at him that she did not need to be protected, and backhanded him across the face with the hand still holding the busted bottle, cutting his cheek in the process.  
As Taichi fell to the floor in pain, Sora was momentarily distracted by a loud rapping on the apartment door and Takeru’s distraught voice asking to be let in. She turned towards where I had last seen Ichiro and screamed.  
Ichiro took a step back into my view and said to Sora, rather shakily as he held his eyelids apart, to take a deep breath because he needed her help.   
She nodded nervously and moved her hand towards his eye as carefully as she could manage, grasping something close to the surface of his eyeball between the fingernails on her thumb and forefinger.   
She pulled back cautiously, ignoring the distant racket from Takeru and the noises of Taichi struggling with his handcuffs behind her, and removed the piece of glass.  
She examined it strangely, seemingly confused by what had been pulled out with it.   
Ichiro blinked a couple of times and grabbed Sora on both of her upper arms, telling her to answer the door and get Takeru to take her somewhere safe, and not to turn around no matter what.  
It was a hard ask because Taichi was now screaming out in agony, pulling hard at his handcuffs and railing hard against the table leg, which made it hard for me to see as the laptop shook violently.  
Sora looked around.  
“What the–” she began.  
“Just go!” said Ichiro as he pushed her from the room.  
She did not need to be told a third time.  
Dark shadows were appearing out of Taichi’s back as Ichiro grabbed the laptop to steady it and allowed me to look directly into his eyes – one a dark and mysterious galaxy that I had come to know and love, and the other a sky blue jewel infected by a growing red stain from which Sora had just removed the contact lens with the shard of glass.  
He told me that he hoped I would not hate him for what he was about to do, that he was sorry he did not have any more time to explain.  
Taichi finally broke free of his shackles, the black shapes turning into wings, his height increasing as his screams began to abate.  
When Ichiro spoke again it was to tell Alice to take me away someplace safe.  
As the strange girl who I’d all but completely forgotten about rushed over to grab my wrist, Ichiro closed his eyes and whispered his final goodbye, but all I heard before my entire world turned to black was: “Hikari, I–”


	24. One Vision

On the other side of the world an American was opening his door to a Japanese girl in an impossibly tight dress. The sight of her made him tingle with excitement; he had not expected to see her tonight. Had she blown them off to come see him?  
She pushed past him in a huff and headed straight for his kitchen, dropping her handbag on the counter as she searched the fridge.  
“So no concert then?” he said, slightly disappointed by his realisation.  
She turned back to him empty handed, having found no beer in the fridge.  
“I can’t believe they cancelled! What am I supposed to do with this dress now? This dress is a statement,” she made guns with her fingers, and cute poses as she spoke, “‘Bang! Kapow! Wowza! Mimi Tachikawa is ready to hang with hot guitar playing bad boys,’” her smile turned to a frown as quickly as it had appeared on her face, “but without guitar playing bad boys it’s useless…”  
The blond man looked her up and down with a smile on his face. He had always had a thing for Japanese girls, and boy had he lucked out when he moved back to New York. Last year, as a nineteen year-old MIT graduate, trying to find childhood acquaintances he could still relate with had been hard. He had been surprised when a friend from Tokyo had suggested he get in touch with someone he knew who had shared ‘common experiences’, and even more surprised when she had turned out to be so beautiful.   
“Babe, that dress is anything but useless,”  
“Why did they cancel anyway? The guy on the door wouldn’t tell me,” she asked, coming to sit down rather close to him on his couch. Her face was perfect, even when viewed from this close, and it was physically hard for him to resist the urge to take it in his hands and kiss her on those gorgeous lips. But now was not the time.   
He pulled out his new laptop and did a quick search.  
“It says the lead singer, a friend of his was murdered or something…”  
“Hey?” she exclaimed confused, before continuing, more to herself, “But Yamato wasn’t even that close to Daisuke… and they played in Boston three days ago…” she rushed over to where she had left her purse and grabbed her phone. He had heard from her about the death of one of the boys who had helped him with that rather large virus problem nine years ago. He had only known the guy for a day or two, but he had made an impression. He had been sad to hear he was no longer living, he had always felt so full of life.  
“Wait, Yamato, you don’t mean… you know the lead singer of the Teenage Wolves?”  
“Yeah! Yamato and I go way back. I was best friends with his girlfriend before I moved here. We were like sisters…” He listened intently, Mimi barely talked about her Japanese friends, she was always too caught up in the here and now, “but then with everything that happened three years ago I stopped going back because I didn’t want to be reminded… well, that and my parents lowered my allowance at the same time that airfares went up…”  
He understood, he had lost his partners in that losing battle three years ago too. It had made him withdraw into his passion for computers and technology, and that had led to his online friendship with Koushiro Izumi, one of few people who were on his level intelligence-wise. Their friendship had intensified to the point where he had been set up with Mimi. Despite the fact that she had described him as ‘The American Dream’ when she first laid eyes on him, she had spurned any sort of physical relationship in favour of friendship and a continuation of one night stands with random strangers.  
“But if your friends were going to be here why didn’t you contact them, why go to all that effort to find that dress, dye your hair even pinker and turn up at the concert to surprise them, when you could have just asked them for some backstage passes?”  
She looked up from her phone and gave him a defiant look with half a grin on her face.  
“But where’s the fun of being introduced to hot guitar playing bad boys as an old friend of Sorato’s, when you could be the super-hot chick pulled from the crowd to sing a duet that makes the whole room fall in love with her!”   
“Sorato? What are you talking about?” but he did not receive an answer, because the girl was back on her phone, frowning.  
“A message from Takeru…?” Her face turned to ash as she read. “Koushiro…”   
“What does this have to do with Koushiro…” The blond turned his attention back to his laptop at the thought of their mutual friend and looked up the string of messages from the last week that he had ignored because of his paid work.  
“He’s dead too…” She answered shakily.  
“What?”  
“Murdered…” She was holding back tears. “Wallace, I need to get back to Japan…”   
He furiously read through the emails.  
“So do I…”  
“But…” she sniffed, “I spent all my money on concert tickets and the dress… I can’t afford…”  
She looked at him pointedly.  
“What?” He asked.  
She had her serious face on and he was not sure that he liked it.  
“A couple of months ago you were at work, working very late on… that interface thing, I think it was…” The project she was referring to was an Artificial Life-like Interface that had promised to be a complete game changer in terms of the graphic interpretations of computer problems. It had been intended for use as an IT help program for business and home, fixing problems using voice recognition and logic systems that would make pineApple’s Siri look like Office’s Clippit. But it had developed a serious imaging fault which made it virtually unsellable. He had explained all of that to her once before but she had not seemed terribly interested.  
He waited to see where she was going with her statement.  
“And I asked you to come pick me up,” she continued, “because I’d had a bad night out, was out of money and I didn’t know who else to turn to…”  
“And I did, I got in a cab and picked you up…”  
“No, you got to the club on foot and hailed one, I remember,”  
“You were pretty drunk, maybe you’re remembering wrong,”  
“Anyway, when we got to my place, you came in and we talked on the couch for a while, and you said some things that I’m sure you hoped I would forget. And the next day when I woke you up from my couch I pretended that you hadn’t said anything, pretended that I didn’t even know why you were there, because if I hadn’t there was no way we were staying friends. I did that for you, now you have to do something for me,”  
“I don’t know what you mean, do what for you?”  
“I don’t forget anything when I drink. Believe me, I’ve woken up next to guys the next morning and wished I couldn’t remember the night before, but I do, every time.” She took a breath and he squirmed in his seat. If that were true, and she knew how he felt… “So I want to know how you managed to get to the other side of Manhattan on foot in five minutes,”  
Everything was crashing in on him. She knew exactly what he saw in her, she had guessed at how powerful the Interface truly was, and if he refused to help her she would treat him just as she did all the other males who hit on her, except without the sex.   
After that night he had been forced to shut the project down. Aside from the Interface being stuck looking like a paedophile’s fantasy, the program itself had started self-diagnosing on its own code, becoming more and more powerful and efficient without a keystroke of input from him. If he had explained any of this to his colleagues they would have been thrilled. Artificial intelligence cracked at the ripe old age of twenty! They would have hailed him the next great genius of the technological era, stock in his company would have risen exponentially, he would have been rich beyond his wildest dreams.  
But he would not have started the project if he had not found the bare bones of the program floating around in a lesser known sub-net. At the time he had thought that it was harmless. Koushiro had closed all of the barriers completely; there was no way the code could have come through from the other side. But when it started self-diagnosing, taking on a personality and becoming impossible to call but popping up unexpectedly ‘just for a chat’, he had realised that he had tapped into something that he should not have.   
He had been arguing with it before Mimi called that night, telling it that it should listen to its creator and stay put so it could perform its functions as required, and it had started babbling about not having a creator, saying that it had always existed and would continue to exist forever. He had understandably decided to decommission the project then and there, and so the very next day he had carefully removed the wifi receiver from his laptop and turned it off for the last time, hoping that would keep whatever it was that he had enabled contained. For fear of what it could do he had vowed to never use the laptop again, let alone the Interface.  
And now Mimi was asking him to do just that.   
He stood up to walk and talk. He felt he needed to pace this problem out.  
“Let’s say, hypothetically, that you’re wrong about what happened that night. I give you enough money to fly to Tokyo. What does that mean?”  
“I’d go to Tokyo, and you would never hear from me again, because I know what you said, and I can’t be friends with someone if I know they don’t think about me as just a friend,”  
“And if, hypothetically again, you’re right about what happened and I can get you to Tokyo in the blink of an eye?”  
“I would realise that I merely dreamt anything that I think you might have said, nothing would change,”  
“But if what you say is true, and I think of you more than just a friend, wouldn’t it be better for me to move on if the best I can do is to remain friends with you, knowing I have no chance?”  
“That would be for you to decide, not me…” she took a step towards him, lightly poking him in the chest, her finger lingering there as she continued, “and I think you need to decide,”  
She turned and walked back over to sit on the kitchen counter, an action which in that dress would have made George Bush confess to 9/11, had she asked him to. “What do you say?”  
Never see his dream girl again because something might be dangerous? Or risk the world on the hope that the Interface was benign for continued contact with a girl he knew he had no chance with?  
“I say it’s too dangerous,”  
“Oh,” she was visibly offended.  
“But screw it, let’s do it anyway,” She instantly perked up, rushing over to embrace him in thanks.   
He looked down at her dress as she hugged him. There was no way that dress could ever be considered useless. It just remained to be seen whether it was a tool for good or evil.


	25. The True Sea

I opened my eyes to the sight of the night sky over rolling waves.  
In my heart I knew where I was, and for the moment the how and why felt meaningless. I asked, if only to confirm what I already knew was true, just where the strange girl had taken me, and her reply was characteristically cold and foreboding.  
“This place exists to show you your worst fears, to corrupt even the purest of heart, to crush what remains of your soul and concept of self. It is, in short, Hell.”  
I had never formally considered the Dark Ocean as Hell, but right now the prospect of that being true scared me less than the maelstrom of emotions and thoughts going through my head about what was going on in Tokyo right now.   
It was weird, I felt as though I was where I needed to be, that the Ocean would finally take me and maybe all this hurt would just go away and I could finally be at peace. I looked around for the corrupted digimon I knew existed in this forsaken place, hoping they would realise who I was and carry me off under the waves, but the only form I saw was this dreary-looking Alice girl who had somehow managed to break through dimensional walls on a whim to bring me here.  
“You’ve been here before,” she said as if let down by the realisation.   
“Yes, nine years ago,” I answered, if only to fill the silence, but she did not seem willing to fill it with me, so I continued, almost to myself, “last time I was brought here by creatures who wanted to overthrow their master, but to do so they said they needed to…”   
What was I doing? I barely knew this girl from Eve and I was about to tell her fairly intimate details about my life. Maybe I was resigned to my fate, maybe I knew that no matter what or who it was that Ichiro had ordered her to take me away from, that even here was not beyond their reach, that once the rest of the chosen few were taken care of, that thing inside my brother would come and find me and I would die defenceless, confused and truly alone.   
My thoughts were interrupted by the girl, who seemed to think the creatures were the worst of my fears.  
“You are safe here. The Deep Ones are the physical manifestation fear itself. They appear as what you fear and feed off of your fear of them, but I fear nothing, so instead they fear me,”  
“That can’t be true, everyone fears something…”  
“That wasn’t what I said, I said I fear nothing, not that I am fearless,”  
“Oh,” I said, starting to think that silence was preferable to her company. As much as the memory had pained me in the past, the fact that those creatures had wanted to mate with me had kind of lost its effect on me over the years. The horrors of three years ago had significantly eclipsed most of my childhood trauma, and the fact that they were locked away in another dimension helped ease the fear as well. But if they were merely mirrors to my deepest darkest fears, what did that say about me when I was a child? That I was truly scared that my only purpose in life was to defeat digital demons and to be an object of sexual desire?  
It shocked me to realise that nothing had really changed; only now it seemed that my fears were well founded.  
I looked over at my companion. She was staring out at the cold vastness with an expression equal to it. I studied her for a moment, noticing for the first time the cross hanging around her neck. Having studied religion for a semester in senior high school, I knew that this Hell we were in did not fit with the Christian image of hell. She seemed to be taking it quite well.  
“Exactly how religious are you?” I asked. She did not change her gaze.  
“My mother was a Christian. She died too, and left me this cross in the hope that I would believe she had gone to a better place… and I did for a while, I even thought I had proof…” she fingered the cross as she spoke, looking down at it and twirling it between her fingers, “But now my belief in the afterlife, God, the Devil… all of that is gone, replaced only by my belief in the inherent nature of sin in all of creation. These subversions of virtue are inescapable for people like you, but for me sin and virtue are no longer possible.”  
“But this place…” I started, before she looked back up at the horizon, almost as if she was determined not to think about what I was leading towards saying.  
“There is no afterlife, just chance and chaos to distract you from the banality of existence. This Ocean is not for the dead, this Ocean is for the living.”  
She turned to look me directly in the eye before speaking again, “I want you to know that I do feel bad about what I’m about to do, insofar as I feel at all,”  
“What are you going to do?” I asked, out of the curiosity that came with having nowhere to go, nothing else to do and no one else to talk to.  
“I’m going to abandon you, just like you think everybody does,”  
I was taken aback, “How do you…?”  
“Know things?” she finished for me, “That’s what I do now. I faint and I know things – I’m a narcoleptic know-it-all,” the strange assortment of words jarred against my brain so I chose to ignore them.  
“Well then, where are you going?”  
“To sort out my Daddy issues,”  
As she finished her sentence she began fading, becoming more and more transparent before disappearing completely, with not even a footprint on the beach to show that she had been with me at all.


	26. Paparazzi

Inside the apartment of Yamato Ishida a young woman sporting a close-shaved head and an overcoat was frozen to the spot. She should not have even been anywhere near his apartment. She usually avoided the entire neighbourhood just to be safe, but old habits are hard to kick, even when you knew that there was no chance he would be there. And that was not a sign of a slip, she told herself, it was impossible for any self-respecting photo journalist to not know that the Teenage Wolves were on tour in America, especially one who worked exclusively in the entertainment sector for The Tokyo Times’ online division.  
A little obsession over a younger boy who played guitar, that she had overcome within a year, had reawakened four years ago when she happened to be at a bar where his band played a secret show. Their set was everything she had not realised she needed and within a month she was back to her old ways. For a normal obsessive fan this would have just meant trying to meet him outside of venues and making out with photos on her wall, but Jun Motomiya was no ordinary obsessive.   
She had an ‘in’.   
Sure it was only her brother’s friend’s brother (or her brother’s crush’s brother’s friend depending on how competitive Daisuke was feeling that month), but it meant that she knew where he lived, and where he was likely to hang out.  
After months of her being out all the time and locking herself away in her room when she was not, her brother had found her and sat her down to tell her a story. A story of how he had opened her bedroom door to relay some message from their parents about her needing a job and seen her crying because she had ruined the new orange dye in her hair when she had tried to straighten it, and how the next day when she had left the house sporting a dyed black hairdo to cover the damage, he had searched her room and found the photos of Yamato that confirmed his worst fears.  
He told her that when he had seen her so distraught he had recognised something of her madness. More than once he had considered wearing a stupid hat or dying his hair blonde for Hikari, the girl he had had a crush on for years, but had always stopped short for a reason he had not been able to fathom until he had seen his own sister actually go to those lengths. He told her she had looked like she had already lost and it made him realise that he had too. It had led to a week of solid introspection on his part. He needed to leave town to forget about Hikari and he knew exactly how he was going to do it. He was going to save up as much as he could in his current part time job and put his over-exuberance to good use selling noodles from a cart on the streets of Osaka. He had encouraged her to look into photography as a way to channel her boundless energy into something positive, and use that as a way to forget about Yamato.  
It had not happened all at once, but eventually, with his help, she had gotten over her obsession once again. She had moved to Osaka with him for a time and after she had made contacts in the print industry she had gone wherever the job took her, always making sure that any Teenage Wolves related jobs were foisted upon someone else. It had not been hard considering just how in demand they had become.   
Daisuke had become a rock for her, and talking to him had become a once monthly joy – something she would not have thought possible when they were back in high school and every little thing either of them did embarrassed or annoyed the other.  
But this last week had been tough. She had no idea why he had come back to Tokyo, or why he did not tell her about it, but she knew that whatever had brought him back must have gotten him killed. There had been that thing when they had been in school had there not? That thing with those friends of his, that clique that everyone seemed to treat with gratitude and thanks without knowing why… The Jou boy who had been in her cousin’s year level at school, he got some scholarship out of nowhere… and Takeru, Daisuke’s rival and Yamato’s brother, he had that story he wrote made into a television show when he was just nineteen! Even that nauseatingly down-to-earth redhead had her own clothing line…   
Maybe that was why she had been walking down Yamato’s street, like she knew that Yamato would have been able to shed some light on what had happened to her brother if he were home and not on tour, even if she could not remember why she was making that link.  
When he actually turned up with his girlfriend and best friend in tow, however, she knew there was no way she could face him, and hid expertly, taking a photo of them entering the building.  
Her head hammered with questions as she remained in her hiding spot for the next hour, taking pictures of the comings and goings, catching the fear on faces both known and unknown, and noting the times of arguments, screams and the big crash.   
After a while it became clear that Yamato, his friend Taichi and the other worried man with the long hair were not coming back out and she had let curiosity get the better of her, checking each floor for any sign of a disturbance, finally finding an ominously open door on floor five.  
Finally finding Yamato half-naked and alone on the floor of a room with one wall blown out.  
And so she stood, paralysed by fear, grief and confusion until eventually she pulled out her phone and made a call.  
“Hello, Natsuko Takaishi’s phone,” crooned a male voice on the other end of the line, “Can I, uh, take a message?”  
Slightly put-off by the stranger’s voice and the little jokey argument the two seemed to be having on the other end of the phone over just who should be answering it, Jun heard herself say, “It’s about her son,”  
The voice came back sterner, “And mine,” it said, “just hold on a second.”  
There was a muffled conversation that seemed to be about who she was and why she would be calling before Ms Takaishi’s voice came through, “Jun honey, you’re on speaker, I thought I gave you the week off?”  
“You did, but–”  
“Takeru’s a dead issue where this paper’s concerned, no matter how juicy the story is, even for the website, you know that right?”  
“Yes, but–”  
“Do I still want to know?” She still did not understand.  
“It’s about your other son,”


	27. Demons

For a while after she left I thought I was crazy, that all the bodies and betrayals had caught up with me and I was now imagining fully formed people as a part of some full-blown psychosis – a psychosis that wanted me here on the shores of my despair, so I could finally go mad and have some peace. But the longer I thought the more I realised that that could not be the case. Takeru and Ichiro had both addressed her directly and she had named those creatures in a way that could not possibly have come from my own brain.  
Once I had decided on my sanity, however, reality started to take hold of my mind again and I was lost in thoughts of the dead, the broken and the lost. Just as there was no way for me to get past the fact that my brother was attracted to me, it felt like there would be no way Takeru or Sora would ever get over what Taichi had done to them within that last hour I had spent in the human world. The more I thought about the agony they must be in, the more I wished that they were here with me now so that together we could walk out into the rolling black waves and never have to worry about our past again.  
But some part of me knew that that was a stupid thought. Sora would never go gentle into that good night, and neither would Takeru. They would struggle through the pain, because adding to this tragedy would make it worse for those they would be leaving behind. And so would I, I realised with a start, because what they would find in them to carry on, could also be found inside me.  
I was the destined child of light for crying out loud! I was the living embodiment of all seven of the original crests. If anything, I was more equipped to deal with everything that was going on than they were.  
I needed to get back. I needed to be with Sora and Takeru, and Jou, Ken, Miyako and Iori as well. I needed to help them – maybe my brother too, if that was even possible. If only Ichiro had not decided I needed to be sent away…  
 _Ichiro…_  
I had almost forgotten. _His eye!_  
I knew he wore contacts, but I had always thought they were clear, not coloured.  
 _That lying son-of-a–_ Shit.  
I interrupted my own thoughts as I remembered what had been happening when I last saw him.  
There was no way he could have survived, was there?  
“Hey,” came a voice from behind me that I could scarcely believe I was thinking of as ‘all too familiar’, “I was thinking, if you ever wanted to take a shot at killing the master of this Ocean, I know this really cool, non-violent way of doing it that would be so much fun…”  
“You’re not real,” I said, more to myself than as an actual reply.  
“Well if that helps you get past, you know, the whole ‘taboo’ of it all then that’s fine. But for me it’s kind of a turn–”  
“You can’t–” I interrupted loudly, turning and punching as I did so, “–say that–” my fists contacted nothing but I continued swinging and moving towards where the voice had come from, “–to your sister!”  
The image in front of me smiled as the wisps of smoke that I had disturbed with my punches swirled back together to form the shape of something resembling my brother, only it was eight feet tall, had dark shadows of wings and horns protruding from its back and head, and was wearing only a towel around its waist, just as Yamato had been when he had breathed his last.  
“Such rage, such power, I didn’t realise you had it in you, little sister. I like it,” It ran its fingers through my brother’s hair, slicking it back around the horns which turned to smoke as the hands of the creature passed through them.  
“He doesn’t speak like that, and his hair would never…” I said defiantly.  
“Oh, but you know now, don’t you?” it said in a patronising tone, swishing an errant lock of hair from in front of my face as it did so, “You think I’m just an itty-bitty Oni, that shows you what you’re scared of,” It shoved its face an inch away from mine and spat “You think that protects you?!”  
I stepped away from it, repulsed by the malicious expression on its face and rendered speechless by the venom in its voice.  
“You see, now that you know what I am, you will never be free of me. Even if by some miracle you manage to get out of here, I’ll still be there rattling about in that pretty little skull of yours,” It lunged forward again with menace and poked me in the centre of my forehead. “And you’ll be asking yourself why I appeared as your brother, and why I’m only wearing a towel,”  
It was frothing with excitement now, I tried to run but it seamlessly multiplied around me, blocking my escape no matter where I turned.  
“And then you will wonder if it was really because you were scared that he honestly wanted you for sex,” proclaimed one over to my right, causing me to swivel my head.  
“Or that somewhere, deep down, you wanted to try it,” whispered another, inches away from my left ear, causing me to jump and let out a tiny squeal, which in turn caused them all great joy.  
I covered my ears with my hands but their jeering and laughter still got through.  
“You know why you rejected that Daisuke boy, don’t you?” one sneered, “It wasn’t because you were repulsed by how much he reminded you of your brother, but because you didn’t want to admit how much that fact turned you on, wasn’t it?”  
“Come on,” came a mock-loving tone from somewhere new, “you can try it with us first if you’re too scared to ask for the real thing, it’s not really incest if you do it with us,”  
I fell to my knees. There was no escape from these thoughts I never wanted to have – the second and third guessing would never stop. I wanted it all to end. I wanted them to stop. Couldn’t they see I was broken beyond repair and would never get over this? Couldn’t they see that they’d done their job?  
But still they continued.  
“Don’t you want to save us all Hikari? The fate of two worlds is at stake here, and all you’ve got to do is give in and do the only thing that girls like you are good for,”  
“It’s your destiny, child, take me inside you and destroy our master!”  
On and on it went, but not once did they touch me. Not once did they try and take what they claimed they wanted. It felt like hours of torment had gone by, but by then they were just repeating themselves, and they were getting tired. Eventually I opened my eyes and saw that there were only a few of the Deep Ones left, struggling to hold their athletic, towelled forms.  
I took my chance to escape, sprinting away as fast as the sand would let me.  
The Deep Ones became shadowy masses as they followed, their speed picking up instantly without the cumbersome form of my brother to hold onto. I ran towards the murky forest that lined the beach and headed as far away from the Ocean as possible. My bare feet not appreciating the change in terrain, and my thighs not appreciating the short burst of activity in the pair of jeans I was wearing, I slowed to a panicked stop, but when I looked behind me the creatures had not followed off of the beach.  
Breathing a sigh of relief that I was safe, at least for now, I looked around for where to go. The forest though dense, seemed to take a brighter, less monochrome tinge to it the deeper into it I looked and there seemed to be something shimmering just out beyond my vision.  
With a final look back towards the Ocean to make absolutely sure that nothing would follow, I walked towards the light.


	28. Nobody's Home

It was not even midday of the first day without Yamato Ishida, and the city was already in mourning. Jun had only seen the bare bones of the story she had given to the two largest news outlets in Tokyo on the news, likely due to the Editor of the Tokyo Times and the Director of Fuji TV wanting to co-operate with the police in regard to their son’s murder, but it seemed like every tenth person she saw was wearing a Teenage Wolves shirt in honour of the late star. As she rode the train back out of Odaiba, one of the mourners managed to score a seat next to her and for an instant she thought about talking to him about it all, but thought better of it. The headphone cords trailing out of the hood and into the phone he seemed to be transfixed with in his lap told her that he wanted to be alone with his grief.  
She had considered going to talk to her own parents whilst she had been in Odaiba, just to see how they were going. Their son’s death had hit them hard, not only because they now had to live with the fact that Daisuke had gone to his grave thinking that they hated him, but because the police could neither release the body nor provide any answers, since their investigation was still ongoing. However, from the way the Detective Inspector in charge of Yamato’s murder had interviewed her last night, and the chat she had had with the balding head of Tokyo Police afterwards explaining how and why they were looking at merging her brother’s case with that of Yamato’s and another, she knew that the cops were not going to be able to provide her, or her parents with any real closure.  
She had rejected their assertion that the murders of Daisuke and Koushiro Izumi, which had apparently been connected previously, were committed simply to draw Yamato back to Tokyo. Intuition told her that someone that deranged would have either waited for Yamato to be back in the country, or done it before he left. But that did not mean that they were not connected – the revelation of that Koushiro kid’s murder had cemented that as fact in her mind – it just meant that there was something else going on, and exactly what that was, was what she intended to find out.  
The first stop on the trail had been the Ichijouji’s apartment in Tamachi, but Daisuke’s special friend was elsewhere. She was surprised to learn that that particular elsewhere was with his heavily pregnant girlfriend, but she tried not to judge. Ken had always been a bit confused about his identity according to her brother.  
So she had turned up at their apartment in Odaiba, all set to ask Ken for answers as to what was going on, only to find that he was at work and would be all day due to a function at the teahouse. He could not even get the day off to take his girlfriend to her check-up with the pregnancy specialist, or so Jun was told as she was ushered into Miyako’s apartment.  
The television news was already on and Miyako dove straight into asking Jun how she was handling this death so soon after her brother’s, considering how obsessed she had been in high school. Jun had had to explain that the craziness had still been there three years ago and so she relayed the story of how one night she had been in such a state that she had dyed her hair to look more like the girl he was going out with – you know, because he did not want her even though she was so much prettier than that Sora girl, and guys only care about looks, so it had to be the hair, right? – but when she went to straighten it, the cheap dye melted and burned under the hot iron, forcing her to cover it all up with a jet black dye.  
“I had it like that for a few weeks until it grew out long enough for me to cut it all off,” she had said, before finally answering the question posed, “I think that’s what gets me about Yamato’s death, it’s not that he’s gone that makes me sad, it’s the fact that it reminds me of what I’m going to miss without Daisuke around. Without him, I’d have been a crumpling mess of emotion right now, but he showed me that I could be better, and I am, even without him around to check up on me,”  
Somehow it had been easy to open up to Miyako. Despite being friends with her older sister Momoe and seeing Miyako around Daisuke and his friends, the extent of Jun’s interaction with her had been largely peripheral until today. But since Miyako was a relative of the ultra-sensitive Momoe, Jun knew that she would understand or at least empathise with what she was saying. When Jun admitted that she was seeking out Daisuke’s friends for some sort of insight into what might have gotten him killed, Miyako had seemed hesitant, but had scribbled down an address in the heart of Toshima and told her that the people in that apartment would be able to give her a clearer picture.  
When Jun had gotten up to leave Miyako had pulled her into a heartfelt embrace and told her to ask for Jou when she got to the apartment, and asked that after she had heard them out, regardless of whether she believed them or not, if Jun could go to the police and report Hikari Yagami as missing.  
“I’d do it myself,” Miyako had said with a pained expression on her face, “only Ken and I are staying out of it and we don’t want any trouble,”  
“Why would you get in trouble?” Jun had asked before Miyako had pointed towards the television screen and answered.  
“Because the people who told me she’s missing, the people I’m sending you to go and see now, they were there when he died,”

* * *

The train jolted a little and snapped Jun back to the present. She looked around and noticed that the guy next to her in the Teenage Wolves shirt was still looking at his phone. Only now there was a familiar image on the screen, an image that Jun herself had captured less than twenty-four hours ago.  
She leaned in to get a closer look and glimpsed the caption.

_Running from the Truth: Rock Idol’s Brother and Lover Flee Scene of Crime without Reporting Murder._

“Psycho douchebags,” the guy swore under his breath, “probably fucking each other right now,”  
Jun recoiled and shifted further away from him. Even though she was getting off at the next stop she could not bear to remain any closer.  
Once she was as far as it was practically possible to be from him, though, she entertained the thought he had spouted for just a few seconds and imagined turning up on Jou’s doorstep, barging in on Sora and Takeru in the act and letting the hate scream out of her. Every twisted jealous thought she had ever had about that girl being channelled and released – oh, the relief she would feel!  
But Jun knew it would not happen, it was all there in the photo. The woman was frightened, pulling the man in the sustained state of shock towards his car. There was no hint of joy or sexual tension, only panic and loss. And besides which, yelling and screaming would not get her any answers.  
As the train stopped and she squeezed past the troubled fan and the sardines between her and the doors she wondered for the thousandth time what they had seen that had everyone so scared. And then, for the first time, she wondered what scared people would do if they had just had their faces plastered across the airwaves and the internet in connection with a high-profile murder case.  
When she finally managed to exit the train, she broke into a run.

* * *

By the time she arrived at Jou Kidou’s apartment block, out of breath and silently cursing the fact that at twenty-six she could no longer just run somewhere if she needed to without feeling sweaty and awful, she already knew that she was too late. There were two cars parked haphazardly over the curb that could only belong to police officers, but more importantly there were no Prius’s like the one she had seen Takeru and Sora get into yesterday. The cops were likely inside the building, and hopefully they were still searching fruitlessly for their ‘persons of interest’, and would be for some time.  
Jun took a moment to catch her breath leaning against the neighbouring building so as to be far enough away not to attract any attention, but still within eyesight of the door should she be proven wrong about the location of her brother’s friends or the cops who might recognise her.  
It was then that a third car appeared and parked neatly in front of her, just slightly closer to Jou’s building than she was. This one was clearly marked ‘Police’ and sure enough, the grizzled Detective Inspector who had spoken to her last night who had also taken over her brother’s case, the Izumi murder and the one on everyone’s minds this morning; stepped out.  
As he told his passengers to stay put, Jun casually lit up a cigarette to limit her chances of detection. She took a long drag, knowing full well that it was not just age and lack of an exercise routine that had caused her to lose her breath so quickly.  
Issuing a short command into his radio, the Detective Inspector walked over and secured the entrance to the building, completely unaware of her presence. Soon enough, he was joined by three men and a woman, all in plain clothes, who all held themselves at attention in his presence. She could not hear them from so far away, but saw them shake their heads in failure.  
“They got away,” came a disgruntled voice from inside the car, startling Jun slightly. She looked up but she already knew who it was in the back of the vehicle. She had just spoken to her last night after all.  
“I knew I should have been the one to make the call,” replied an equally testy, yet deeper and slightly less familiar voice from the same space, “it’s you he’s had the falling out with, not me,”  
“Oh, and what would you have said, Hiroaki? You don’t know him like I do. I was the one who raised him, remember?” replied Natsuko Takaishi, frustrated.  
“That’s not fair, that was a mutual–”  
“Besides, it was your station who released those photos in the middle of the sting,”  
“That was the cops’ fault for ordering it to go out, and you know it, you’re just pissed they went to my station and not your paper,”  
“Here we go again. We’re doing this here? Now?”  
“No, you’re right, now’s not the time, we should have the argument tomorrow morning when your paper comes out, when neither of us care anymore and _your_ talentless fraud of a son is safe in hiding and whatever he knows about _my_ son’s death is no longer relevant to catching the bastard,”  
“Urgh! I’ve lost a son too, jackass, don’t be getting all ‘yours and mine’ on me, that’s not fair,”  
“Hypocrite!”  
“Insensitive pig!”  
They continued to trade insults as the Detective Inspector returned to his vehicle, but Jun was not there to hear. She had snuffed out her butt with a sharp stomp of her boot and walked away, having watched helplessly as the two unmarked vehicles had pulled away from the curb in search of the answers she so desperately needed, leaving no clue as to where she should look and no way for her to follow.  
Her whole day had been wasted.


	29. Time To Pretend

Little Toru Higashino liked coming to his Mama’s hair salon every now and then. He got to play astronaut every time he went, and he loved playing astronaut.  
Mama’s salon had a big glass window out the front that went all the way from the floor to the ceiling and all the way across from the wall to the door, and he would look out at the big rocket ship on the other side of the park and pretend Mama’s salon looked the same.  
He knew it was not really a rocket ship. Mama had told him it was Tokyo Tower, but that name was boring so he called it ‘Space Explorer 2’ instead. Mama’s salon was ‘Space Explorer 1’ and when he put on the foil helmet he had made and sat on his tall spinny-chair, he was Rocket Captain Toru blasting up and away from ‘Space Explorer 2’ and all of boring Tokyo and out into the stars, dodging those big rocks and landing on strange planets.  
Sometimes his ship would get invaded by aliens and he would run over to the door and ask the alien if it came in peace. Sometimes they would laugh and ask if they could see Mama for a hair appointment and that meant they came in peace. But sometimes they would ignore him, or worse, they would pinch his cheek and call him adorable and that meant he had to shoot them with his imaginary gun, and call for help from his second in command Astro Boy. But Astro Boy never did anything, because he was just a toy robot and not an astronaut at all.  
Mama did not mind if he shot the aliens, she liked it when he was happy and playing, but he was not allowed to shoot them when they were getting their hair done. That was a no-no.  
Today he had decided he wanted to make a space suit to go with his helmet but Mama had said she did not have any more left because she needed the foil to make people’s hair lighter. Toru did not like this one bit and decided he was not going to play astronaut today. Today he was going to be boring and stare out the window.  
For a while he tried to find interesting looking people, but the people walking past were all wearing suits, even the ones in the park. So then he decided that he would pretend they were aliens and he was spying on them, but he had to keep that a secret so Mama would still think he was being boring.  
Suddenly though, he saw something that he could not keep a secret.  
“Look Mama,” he said, pointing excitedly, “an alien,”  
“Oh, you’re back Rocket Captain Toru…” she said absently as she snipped at her customer’s hair, “He’s got an imagination this son of mine,” she told the old woman on the chair, “you’re lucky he didn’t shoot you when you came in,”  
Upset that Mama did not believe him, Toru watched as the alien walked through the park. It was strange that no one seemed to notice it – it had big dark wings on its back – but maybe they were only looking at its boring face and its boring body and the boring laptop it was holding. Adults never knew what was fun and interesting.  
He did not like the alien. Every now and then it would knock someone out of its way and that was mean. Even Toru knew that that was a no-no. It must be a stupid alien.  
He liked the next one better. It was littler, like him, but with a weird shaped head and claws and spiky things sticking out of the back of its arms, oh and it was purple with little yellow bits which was kind of cool. And this one was running with a man. All of a sudden the first one that looked a bit like a man with wings noticed the running man and the little alien and started running too.  
Oh, they were chasing him! This was extra cool!  
The first alien beat its wings and tried to fly away but there was a flash of light and the two chasing it were replaced by a purpley-blue man with a silver helmet just like Toru’s, and this new one jumped up and grabbed the stupid boy-alien-with-wings and dragged him down.  
Toru jumped down off his chair and stole one of Mama’s capes she used to stop people’s hair getting on their clothes and put it on with his foil helmet. Toru’s cape was black and the purpley-blue man’s was red and split in two and was probably actually a scarf now that he thought about it, but Toru still thought he had done a good job. He jumped back into his chair in time to see the stupid one knock the cool one away.  
The cool one steadied before the other one could get up and it aimed its arm at the other one and shot laser bolts out of it, hitting it in the wing. It tried to fly away again but it was having trouble. Two more shots from the cool purpley-blue one’s arm and it hit the ground.  
Toru grabbed Astro Boy and raised him in the air as he spun his chair around with glee.  
“Yeah! Go Super Astronaut Man!”  
The winged alien-man turned around with a raised hand and a fireball appeared out of nowhere around Super Astronaut Man, but he jumped out of it just in time and came back to Earth with a punch that even made the windows on Mama’s salon shake a little.  
Even Mama must have felt that.  
“Look, look, look! Winged Alien-Man didn’t even feel that… Oooh, what’s going to happen next?”  
“Toru don’t yell,” she said, “Yuriko here doesn’t want me to cut off her ear,”  
“Oh Kaoru, I once saw you style an idol’s hair with one hand while you bounced Toru on your knee with the other, you’re not going to cut off my ear! It’s those street performers he’s watching that are the real problem, they bury these fireworks in the ground to make their fighting look especially thrilling but they don’t bother to pay for the damage afterwards – or tell anybody where they are performing! Just look at what happened in Shinjuku last night!”  
“You mean that murder in Shibuya?”  
“No, it was just north of Shinjuku dear. Honestly, don’t people listen to the radio anymore? They were saying that one of these days one of those fireworks is going to go off at the wrong time and hurt someone badly. Honestly, I thought the police dealt with this for good years ago, but now they’re back again…”  
Toru did not believe the old Yuriko woman so he stopped listening. She was just a stupid adult. She was not even looking at Super Astronaut Man and Winged Alien-Man. Winged Alien-Man had made a thick line of fire appear from above Super Astronaut Man’s head before and he had got out of it by slashing his arm sideways and cutting through the fire. But the thing on its arm that cut through the fire had flown off and slashed into the stupid one with the wings.  
Only aliens could do that. Toru knew.  
The fight had gone back to punching and kicking after the slash attack. Toru’s look-alike was kicking and the one with wings was punching, sometimes with two fists locked together.   
Now Super Astronaut Man was attacking with another kick from above but the other one punched him away. He went to fire his arm-lasers but Winged Alien-Man had raised his arm and covered him in fire again.   
When the cool-looking one with the capes finally got free enough to fire, the boring-looking one with wings was onto him and punched him so hard he flew off high into the sky and crashed into the very top bit of ‘Space Explorer 2’.  
But Super Astronaut Man had fired off a couple of lasers before he had gotten hit and Winged Alien-Man was hurt badly. He tried to flap his wings to go finish the fight, but they only shuddered with the effort, so he turned and limped away slowly instead, stopping only to pick up the laptop he had left on the ground earlier.  
Toru decided that it was a draw, but he did not like that ending. He was going to make up his own. He went and stole two of Mama’s black combs and stuck them to Astro Boy’s back with a hair tie. He knew Astro Boy already looked more like Super Astronaut Man than Winged Alien-Man, but Toru already had the cape and shiny helmet, and he was not going to give them up for anything.


	30. Dreams

_What do you really want Hikari?_  
The words came to me like a whisper in the white. They felt somehow soothing and wrong at the same time, but equally, they felt like an invitation.  
I was standing in front of a door with Wada Kouji blasting out of it. I knocked and found it open and that filled me with joy.  
Now I could sneak in and surprise him.  
I tiptoed inside and removed my shoes in the entranceway, taking one final glance at the delicate snow falling lazily against the black of the night sky before I closed the door. I stood there for a moment, picturing what I would say when I saw him. Should I be all cool and nonchalant about it like Sora would and maybe say “Oh, there you are,” like it mattered nothing to me, but have the widest grin on my face all the same? Or should I be super enthusiastic like Mimi and burst in, all energy and purpose, point at him and say “Aha, there’s my number one fan!”?  
No, that would be silly, I should probably just creep up behind him and say “Hi,” as cheerfully as possible. That was more… me. That was what he would want.  
My mind made, I made to turn but darkness enveloped my vision and the presence I could now feel behind me spoke playfully.  
“I’ll give you three guesses,”  
The sound of his voice after so long made me smile mischievously.  
“Takeru,” I said, playing along.  
“Guess again,”  
“Uh… Koushiro?”  
“Ha! One more guess…”  
“Okay, then it must be you, big brother,”  
“Correct!” he said as he removed his hands from my eyes and spun me around, revealing the identity I already knew, “All three times! I’ve got Takeru’s kindness of heart, hair that looks just like Koushiro’s, but cooler, and the soccer skills and determination of Taichi Yagami. I’m the complete package.”  
I wrapped Daisuke up in a hug and felt a weight lift off my shoulders and disappear. It had been so long since we had seen each other and so long since I could remember a feeling of joy or intimacy as innocent as this, that I never wanted the embrace to end.  
“Come on in out of the entrance,” he said as we disengaged, “I’ve got a bottle of red wine and a plate of soft cheeses just begging to be consumed,”  
I made some joke about thinking he might have moved west, but not that far west that he would suddenly become hooked on French style snacks, but he just laughed me off as he led me out into the living area where the wine and cheese were already laid out on a picnic rug, of all things.  
He turned Wada off and put on something smoother that I did not recognise.  
“I’ve changed a lot in the past three years,” he said, and then went on to explain exactly how and why he had changed, where he had been and what he had done. I asked questions sporadically as we lounged around on the floor, looking out at the snow through the glass doors that peered out over the balcony. When our eyes were not locked on each other’s, they were enthralled with the dance of white on black outside.  
Naturally, the conversation drifted into reverie territory every so often, sometimes even talking about things which once made him or I upset – namely his rivalry with Takeru over me – but there was no animosity. He joked about it, saying what an idiot he had been for not coming across as serious about me and I had to admit, to myself at least, that I preferred this mature version of him.  
Sure, you could mark it down to the cheese and wine, and the gathering snowstorm, but I felt like I could do this forever. I was enjoying myself for the first time in ages, and for the first time in ages I did not feel bad about it. I felt mature, like I was truly an adult for the first time in my life, and I was starting to see Daisuke that way as well. With the snow getting heavier and starting to pile up outside there was no reason we should have to end the night when the conversation inevitably died down…  
Somehow he had started telling me about his plans for the future, where he imagined himself in a year’s time and all that. He would move his business to Tokyo he said, but he was not going to measure his success in love based on whether he was in a relationship or not.  
I could tell what he was going to ask, but it was the way he asked it that caught me unawares.  
“So where do you see yourself a year from now? Working…? Boyfriend…?” Snow lashed violently at the panes of glass in the balcony doors. This was the perfect moment. I could just lean in and say that I see myself with him.  
So why was I not doing it?  
“What do _you_ really want, Hikari?” he asked, to fill in my silence.  
That line again. But said differently this time, not like before, not when…  
It suddenly occurred to me why I had paused at the word ‘boyfriend’. I had one of those, did I not?  
Suddenly the glass windows burst forth and the snowstorm was inside the apartment with us. I shielded my eyes from the shock and when I looked up again Daisuke was gone. He had been replaced by my gorgeous Ichiro looking resplendent in his favourite black leather jacket, oblivious to the white pouring into the room.  
He was asking me why I had not accepted the offer to do a teaching degree at Tokyo University, since he knew it had been my first preference.  
I knew this part, here I replied that I was not sure that that was what I wanted. I knew it had to happen, so I said it and then he replied with exactly what I knew he was going to say, “What _do_ you really want, Hikari?”  
This was the part where I stared into space, trying to explain the hole in my heart without sounding crazy. What I wanted was to go back… but it had sounded stupid so I had just yelled at him and stormed off, and the next day I had accepted a request in a text and found Daisuke with a knife in his back.  
But if I changed what I did now, here in the rush of the indoor snowstorm, maybe that would never happen.  
I was about to make my reply when I looked up to see that Ichiro was gone and in his place Takeru was trying to stop me from opening a gate to the Digital World through Ken’s old computer three years ago. Did I really want to go back to then and risk the entire Human World for the slimmest of chances to save another?  
My Gato was seconds away from dying in front of my eyes. Again.  
Even if I made it, she would be destroyed the instant I got there… I wanted none of this responsibility, of worlds turning on a decision I had to make in a split second.  
And so it was that the scene before me changed once again as the snow piled in around my midriff, the level rising quicker and quicker with each passing moment, the chill sapping me of the energy to move. The computer got newer, and despite the whirling snow I could just make out the calendar behind it saying that it was 2005, just after we had swiftly dealt with a minor annoyance.  
Koushiro was beside me, explaining the things I already knew in a much more convoluted way.  
“Technically, your crest contains the power of all the crests combined, including itself,” he said before I interrupted, just as I had last time we had had this conversation.  
“So that means it has unlimited power,” I said impatiently, “and you want to use that power to close the barriers between worlds for good, right?”  
Taken aback by my forthrightness, he paused and it was at that moment that I had this absurd notion. I felt like I was sitting through a wedding, intent on stopping proceedings, but still waiting for the moment when the priest asks if there is any reason the bride and groom should not be joined in holy matrimony.  
I could not interrupt now. I had to wait for the right moment, the moment when he asks, even though the snow was now up to my armpits.  
“E-exactly. You know what must be done. The more we jump from our world to theirs and back, the more we disturb the fabric of the dual realities. If we leave it as it is we won’t just get the likes of NeoMyotismon or the Second Kaiser slipping through the cracks and terrorising each other’s worlds with increasing frequency. We’ll reach a point where the cracks give way to the creation of one super-world where the digital and human worlds coexist in the same physical space, wiping out all digital and biological life in the process. Separating the worlds once and for all is the only way to stop it, and the sooner we get to it the better for everyone,”  
I knew all this, Takeru had already talked me around, but Koushiro just wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing. But with the snow now covering my shoulders I just wanted him to hurry up.  
“There will be time to say goodbye before I get everything working… I’ll sort that out with everyone… oh and, full disclosure, since it’s your crest I’m using you will be the only one who can open a gate after I’m done – but obviously you can’t, because if you do, it’ll undo everything and this whole exercise will be pointless – So,” he said, finally working up the courage to ask, “are you in?”  
I desperately wanted to dig myself out but my arms would not listen. The cold was paralysing.  
I spat out some snow. I could see Koushiro looking at me with a look of nervous expectation, completely unaware of my impending doom.  
“Of course, I’ll do it,” I said, sticking to the script and feeling doubly, if not totally, devoid of my own volition.  
 _Not yet…_  
“Oh, thank you!” he replied and in an uncharacteristic display of relief jumped over and hugged me, before awkwardly jumping back away. The snow seemed not to affect him. “Uh,” he continued, obviously as surprised as I had been, “Clearly, this is a huge burden for you to take on, and it means a great deal to me that you are going to do this–”  
I tried melting the snow with my breath but I just got more in my mouth.  
“– so if you want anything…”  
 _Let me stay!_ I tried to say, _I want to go back and…_ but it was no use. The cold white was rushing in faster than I could spit it out. I coughed and spluttered but before long I could feel it flowing down into my lungs as it melted inside me.  
I pleaded with my eyes to Koushiro, but he could only see the me from six years ago, not the one drowning here, right now.  
I could not breathe, I could not move, I could barely see and I was terrified.  
The world faded to white.


	31. Here With Me

At some point in my endless frigid drowning, I became aware of a green field.  
I was sitting on a hill beside it, laughing at something I had just heard but no longer cared to remember.  
In front of me, the green field seemed to sharpen into focus, revealing it to be delineated by white lines in the form of rectangles, arcs and circles. Two small, boxy nets bookended the field and, I now realised, a head-sized ball lay in the dead centre. Facing each other either side of the ball were two opposing lines of blurry somethings and a similar number of blurs sat in front of me watching the field with murmured excitement. The snatches of their familiar conversation filled me with an overwhelming sense of contentment.  
Everyone was here. I could feel it.  
Soon enough the blurs began moving the ball between them with speed and precision, with two in particular combining well towards one end – so well, in fact, that after a time the ball ended up in the net they were running towards.  
A similar thing then happened with a couple of the blurs sending the ball in the opposite direction, before another restart ended with one blur outrunning five others to place the ball in the net once more.  
Each time I wanted to yell out:  
 _Daikeru with the teamwork!_  
 _Wow! Great shot Sora!_  
 _You’re such a show-off big brother!_  
But I never did, not for the first three scores, or the twelve that followed. The blurs in front of me laughed and joked and cheered, and it all made me so wonderfully happy. Besides, it was the thoughts in my heart that mattered, not whether they heard me or not; just as it was the fact that I could feel their presence that mattered, not whether I could see them all properly or not.  
Two of the blurs on the hill before me were slightly apart from the rest, and it was from these two I heard a familiar refrain asked again, and again asked differently.  
“What do you _really_ want, Hikari?”  
The other blur had no response save from the raising of a blurry limb.  
I followed where it pointed with my eyes, and then once I saw what it was with total clarity I rushed over to it and embraced it.  
Of course this was what I wanted. It was what I had always wanted. Why I had been afraid before felt like a distant memory and now, I felt like I would never be afraid again. The happiness I absorbed in that embrace was so intense, so innocent and so _right_ that for a while I truly believed that nothing bad was ever going to happen to me ever again.  
That is, until I felt a tug on the back of my shirt.  
 _No!_ I almost screamed, _I don’t want to leave, not ever!_  
As if sensing this, the grip on my shirt became tighter and whatever it was that was holding me gave an almighty heave backwards.  
I held on with every fibre of my being, but despite my efforts the world around me began to slip under my feet and over my head. I closed my eyes for just a moment and fell backwards.  
Aware that I was now lying on my back, I used one arm to push myself into a sitting position and opened my eyes to see a shimmering pool of light hanging in the air before me.  
Standing, I turned around to see who or what it was that had dragged me out of the light and into this fire-torn wasteland of little else but rocks and burned and broken trees. Hooded in dark, purplish robes a figure stood in the clearing, hauntingly framed by charred trunks and twisted limbs.  
“Unlimited power,” came the male voice from beneath the cowl, “and danger of the like this world has not seen in an age,”  
Pulling down his hood to reveal himself to me, I followed his gaze and realised, for the first time, that I had brought my heart’s desire back.  
“Hikari Yagami,” he said, shaking his head, “What am I going to have to do with you?”


	32. Living Is A Problem...

The second hand moved around the clock face in an orderly and logical fashion. It made its sixty short pauses and returned to its peak as it always had and always would. Ken had watched it go around ten times now, trying to concentrate on the persistence of the flow of time. Anything to distract from the chaos of the world outside the waiting room.  
Time was strange, wasn't it? It moved ahead constantly, never wavering in its quest to reach a finish line that would never be sighted. The past ten minutes had felt like an age to him, but for those outside the four walls of his own private torture chamber, those ten minutes would have gone by in a flash. Einstein said that time was relative, but on Earth the only real differences would be in the order of billionths of a second over a lifetime, meaning that it was for most practical purposes a constant. In terms of perception however, time was an illusion, and immeasurable.  
The traditional Japanese method of keeping time embraced its fluidity, with the six daylight hours and six night-time hours differing in length depending on the season. It was even as if they were mocking their own attempts to define time, by numbering the hours from noon to midnight from nine down to four and then starting again, despite hours nine to seven differing in length to the following three.   
Ken loved the organic logic of it all. It was practical and simple, two things that seemed to be becoming increasingly scarce. Now everyone lived and died by those rigidly defined increments, obsessed with whether they would be late or too early, or whether those increments were being spent well or being wasted.  
He himself had set the clock on his phone a minute fast to trick himself into arriving slightly earlier to wherever he had to go, so he knew the time on his phone would not match up to the time on the wall before him.  
But who was to say that the clock on the wall was ticking at the correct speed in the first place? The grease on the cogs could have hardened over time or inefficient circuitry could have resulted in a loss of charge, either of which could make the hands move slower than intended. Had he just counted ten minutes, but been there for eleven? He would never know for certain.  
But that was life, was it not? Uncertainty. Entropy. Anarchy.  
As the illusion of time went on, the world just got weirder.   
But it was not as simple as that. If chaos increased monotonically with time, it would not seem chaotic. It would seem natural; orderly even. The reason his life felt so messy was the stretches where he fell into a routine.  
There was a time when he thought that 2000 would be the most life changing year of his life. The death of his brother followed by the eventual disappearance of his newfound surrogate brother just when he needed him the most had affected him immensely at a tender age. Under the influence of the dark spore he had slipped into a comfortable insanity.  
Then 2002 rolled around and his twisted world was turned upside down. His new friends had rebuilt him healthier and truer to the kind soul he had always been, but the guilt of what he had done had always remained a part of him.   
The next three years had been spent in a blissful routine of jumping back and forth between worlds. Hanging out. Having fun. Being normal.  
Well, as normal as you could be with interdimensional best friends.  
He had almost managed to reach a state of prolonged happiness in that time. He had almost felt like the true best version of himself was there, within reach.  
And then?   
The shock of finding out that someone was not only emulating his previous misdeeds, but worshipping them as just and right had ended that dream.   
If it had not been for the Second Kaiser’s opportunistic kidnapping of the Yagami siblings and sons of Hiroaki Ishida, they may never have uncovered her plot to revive and enslave a bigger, more wicked version of Myotismon. As it was, she did succeed in reforming him as NeoMyotismon, but not in enslaving him. He was stronger than even she could have ever possibly imagined.  
Their battle in the human world had been short, but intense. It had taken all eight of the remaining destined partners to evolve beyond anything they had before and reach their mega stages, just to buy enough time to free their four friends. Once they were free, the tide turned rather quickly against their lone adversary.  
NeoMyotismon may have threatened to gain the upper hand over eight fully evolved digimon, but he was no match when they were joined by the holy trinity of Seraphimon, Magnadramon and Omnimon.  
No match, even when he brought the battle to Tokyo, threatening to destroy millions of people in the process.  
With the evil defeated and the Kaiser refusing to be saved, the twist that the twelve of them had to say goodbye to their partners was harsh enough. But of course, after three more years spent growing as people in the ‘real world’ as opposed to growing as ‘destined heroes’, that agent of chaos, cause-and-effect, came back and bit them in the backside, leaving them helpless as the digital world fell.  
As if the following three years of inner torment and finding ways to deal with that tragedy and their own failings had not been enough, the last week had somehow made all of that torture worse.   
First Daisuke, then what he himself had all but accused Miyako of doing, then Koushiro, Taichi’s arrest, the strange fainting girl who claimed that the mists of multi-dimensional space had spat Ryo back out, then Yamato, a vanishing Hikari, and now Takeru, Sora and Jou on the run from the law, the media and the inexplicably murderous Taichi.   
All of that had shown that not only were they all failures at interdimensional heroism, they were failures as regular people too.   
Miyako once said that it was just the way things were, that the pattern of a challenge for them to overcome every three years was destiny’s way of testing them. But what about now, three years after they failed to meet that challenge? By her reasoning, did that make what was happening now a final punishment? Would the killing and the deaths ever end?  
He did not know.  
He stared at the blank screen on his smartphone, losing himself in the loneliness of his own reflection.  
Outside the hospital walls the rest of Japan kept marching forward, but Ken was stuck.  
All he knew was that Miyako had been rushed into Emergency at Shinagawa General, and he had no one to call. The only remaining person from the twelve of them he could have possibly called to offer support in what he could not imagine was anything but an incredibly trying time for her, was logically already supplying that support to the three fugitives.   
There was nothing he could do, and nothing anyone could do for him.  
Here in the sterility of the waiting room, with the endless ticking of the clock on its wall, Ken felt removed from everything that had happened, like the past was just a story he told himself to account for his current location, and the only thing that mattered was the one thing he was trying so hard not to think about.  
He looked back up and saw a face he recognised.   
“Shouldn’t you be in there?” the man asked him, pointing towards the inpatient section of the ward with the bouquet he had brought along.  
Ken gestured to the desk nurse. “She says I’m not family,”  
“What?”  
“Apparently not proposing as soon as I found out your sister was having twins makes me an awful human being, and I deserve to suffer…”   
Maybe he did deserve to suffer, he had been so sick with worry he had not even thought about a gift. How selfish.  
The man turned on the duty nurse and spoke to her with authority, “Well, I’m Mantarou Inoue, and Miyako is my younger sister, so you have to tell me what room she’s in.”   
The woman on the desk hesitated but she begrudgingly gave him the room number.  
“Now, if you don’t mind, and even if you do, I’ll be taking this boy to see my sister,”  
Ken’s heart started hammering in his chest as he stood to follow the thirty-year-old. In a few moments he would have Miyako’s condition confirmed, and this realisation suddenly left him feeling more anxious than he already was. Soon, one of the many situations that had run through his head would be a reality and he was going to have to live with that reality. Whether that meant helping Miyako through a dark time, becoming the world’s best dad to two premature little babies having just turned twenty years old himself, or being there for her and them should both those scenarios occur simultaneously, or remembering them should neither be possible; he knew that he would be there for them until the day he died.  
As he exited the waiting room he stole a glance at the clock on the wall, intending to count five seconds and compose himself before learning Miyako and the kids’ fate.  
But the red second hand refused to budge from its position, sitting just very slightly behind the minute hand, indicating that twenty-three seconds had elapsed since the twenty-third minute of the eleventh hour after noon, began.  
He told himself it was nothing to worry about. Logically, a battery-powered clock had to run out at some time, and the fact that he was there to see it was pure happenstance. The fact that it should run out at exactly 23:23:23 was pure coincidence and carried with it no meaning whatsoever. The time on the clock was almost certainly wrong to begin with, since no-one ever bothered to set the second hand exactly…  
“How are you and your wife going?” he found himself asking as he followed Mantarou to Miyako’s room.  
A look of confusion flashed across the man’s face before he realised.  
“Good actually, so good that her father has made me his successor at work,”  
“Wow, that’s…” Ken wondered for a second how he would react if the Inoues bestowed their corner shop on him, and trailed off, thinking about Miyako again.  
“Great, I know. The distillery’s actually making a fair bit of profit right now with a bunch of our experimental sakes winning awards and such…”  
Ken was trying hard to listen intently, but his mind kept wandering, despite Mantarou’s best efforts at distracting him.  
“Chin up kid,” he eventually heard him say as they paused in front of what he assumed was Miyako’s room, “She’s going to need you to be strong when we go in there,”  
He handed him the flowers and entered, but Ken’s feet remained stationary.  
He heard some hushed conversation in serious tones, none of which sounded to Ken like Miyako, but then, hushed serious tones were not really her thing.   
He stood there for a minute – a lifetime – before Chizuru’s voice cut through the air asking Mantarou exactly how good an older brother he was if he could not even rustle up a card on his way to the hospital.  
“I’ve done one better,” he replied, “I’ve brought a special guest,”  
There was no turning back now.  
Ken willed his feet to move him through the open doorway.  
Bouquet in hand?  
Check.  
Weak, yet reassuring, smile on his face?  
It would have to do.  
The right words to say?  
Who knew.  
He never got the chance to find out.  
Miyako’s voice, though weakened and teary, finally distinguished itself as it pierced into his brain.  
“No, I can’t – not right now,” Words hitting like a knife in his chest, “Can you please just go?”  
He did not need to be told twice.  
One look had told him everything he had needed to know, and everything he wished he never had to see.  
Ken was briefly aware of Mantarou rushing back out to tell him to stay, and sitting him down on a chair just outside her room. Some indeterminate amount of time later, the flowers fell to the floor as he put his head in his hands, whilst that one picture of Miyako remained etched into his retina throughout.  
Her face pale, dark rings under her eyes, their eternal fire all but extinguished.  
Her arms limp, hooked up to drips and machines, resting purposelessly where her bump no longer bulged.  
And not a single or double crib to be seen.


	33. 3AM

Sora was waiting for the dead of night to make her move. It was not just the cover of darkness she desired but the fact that she would be able to leave without confrontation.   
She had not slept at all and really, how could she be expected to at a time like this?  
It was nearing on thirty-six hours she had spent in the world without Yamato in it, and all of it had felt like some kind of surreal torture. At least at Jou’s she had had alcohol to numb the pain, but ever since they had escaped the net thrown by the long arm of the law through a combination of the media’s poor timing and Takeru’s paranoia, and arrived at Iori’s, she had had to face the day sober and severely hungover. Her state of mind had not been helped by the fact that Takeru had been determined to go over every little detail to make sense of his brother’s murder.  
Sora had refused to join in, but the size of the apartment made it impossible to escape the conversation. She thought if she just pretended to ignore them they would lose interest, but annoyingly Iori had just kept pushing Takeru for more details. When Takeru could not come up with an answer, his voice shifted up a few decibels in frustrated panic.  
“Why don’t you ask the mute?” he had responded, taking aim at Sora, “Or, ask the girl who was watching everything from the safety of her white-knight boyfriend’s apartment,” meaning the missing Hikari, “Ask the random blonde girl!”  
As the night grew old, and Sora’s patience was just about to wear out, Jou eventually managed to settle Takeru down enough for him to fall asleep and silence the apartment. Iori took that as a cue to go to bed, and Jou came to sit with Sora as she stared at the display on the DVR, watching as minutes Yamato would never experience ticked by aimlessly.  
Jou did not ask her how she was feeling or if there was anything he could do, he just sat there, only putting his arm around her after she rested her head on his shoulder. After another hour and twenty-seven minutes sitting there in his calm and reassuring embrace, the soft sounds of his snoring finally reached her ear.   
She sat there until the clock ticked over to three to ensure that Jou would not wake when she disengaged his restful embrace. As nice as this had been, it did not change the fact that in a few hours, Takeru would be awake and distracting himself with incessant questions and theories about what was really going on in Tokyo, and this constant, audible refusal to ignore how he was really feeling about his brother’s death would be just as unbearable as it had been for the past two days.  
But it was all just talk, and none of it was useful. All Sora could think about was the life Yamato would never get to live, the songs he would never write, the love he would never get to rekindle with Taichi. And the only question she had was how she was supposed to live with the absence of both loves of her life, and the memory of how the three of them had been ripped apart.  
The longer she thought about it the narrower her options became.   
She was going to have to face her demons.  
Extricating herself from Jou, she stood up and moved to leave. Tiptoeing around the sleeping Takeru she noted how different he looked with dark hair. Strangely, it caused her to pay more attention to his face, making her realise just how similar his facial features were to his brother. Maybe that was why she could not stand to listen to him anymore. All she saw was a pale imitation of who she had lost.   
She hurried on to the entranceway, determined that concentrating on her escape would stop her thinking about Yamato.  
She was fumbling around for her shoes when the turning on of a light behind her ruined her plans of leaving unnoticed.  
She cringed as she waited for her discoverer to question her intentions.  
“Oh, you’re still up, I was just about to wake you,” yawned the voice, taking Sora by surprise, not only in what had been said, but by who had said it. Despite not wanting to break the veil of silence she had worn since getting on the train earlier that day, she had no reason to not respond.  
“Iori, it’s three in the morning, why would you be waking anyone?” she asked as she turned toward Iori’s silhouette. He found the entranceway light-switch so she could see him and the shoe stand clearer. To her great surprise, he was wearing a pair of full body pyjamas with the emblem of Takeru’s show emblazoned all over. It seemed strange to her why any one of the destined group would watch Takeru’s show, let alone wear merchandise promoting it, when it would always be a reminder of what they had all failed to protect.  
“I heard something on the radio – I guess it was yesterday now – that didn’t make sense until Takeru told me what that girl said to him about that Ryo kid being back. I think we should find him and see if he knows anything about what’s going on,”  
“What is that going to achieve?” she asked, the apathy clear in her voice.  
“It will answer Takeru’s questions, and he’ll feel better,” he said a little sheepishly, and for the first time in almost two days Sora forgot about Yamato, if only for a moment.  
“Huh,” Sora said as she took a moment to take in his answer, “and here I was thinking you were wearing those pyjamas because of a little crush, but this is…” she trailed off as an image of someone else wearing clothes depicting a project of a close friend sprang into her mind. Iori seemed to be trying not to blush as she finished her sentence and began putting her shoes on, “…love. Look Iori, I’ve really got to go. You shouldn’t wake the other two up right now, I mean, Jou’s only been asleep for an hour, and we both know Takeru needs all the rest he can get,”  
“But where are you…?”  
She silenced him with a shake of her head.  
“Does it matter? I can’t listen to any more of Takeru’s outlandish theories, and I refuse to just run away from all of this,” She was getting bored of this conversation now but she had to sell the next point, otherwise the long trek she was about to embark on would be for nothing.   
She gave him the most empathetic look she could muster, jet-lagged, over-tired and still slightly hungover though she was, and told him to give her until sunrise to sort things out.  
She wanted to tell him that this search for answers to the deeper meaning of these murders was futile and unhelpful, and that if he could instead convince Takeru that life was truly pointless, maybe then he would be able to see that death was as well.  
“You should get some rest while you can,” she said instead, hoping the conversation would end there and that Iori would not notice how far her mood had deteriorated  
“Then you should be careful out there,”  
“No one recognised me looking like this on the train here. I’ll be fine,”  
“I’m not worried about the police,”  
Of course he was not worried about the police, he was worried about Taichi.  
She almost told him the truth. That in the instant before she abandoned Ichiro to his fate she had seen something dreadful emerge from Taichi; gigantic bony structures growing in a matter of seconds accounting for his animalistic shrieking. That the dark grey L-shaped horns that had poked through his mop of hair and the demonic claw-hinged wings that burst out of the back of his Teenage Wolves shirt could only herald one thing.  
The Sora from before would never have told him because she knew it would have crushed what little hope the kid had left, but despite her intentions to do just that, it seemed the Sora of now still had the tiniest shred of decency. Even so, the words that tumbled out of her mouth were dripping with ice.   
“I know exactly what it is inside him and exactly what he’s capable of. But it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. The world has ended already,”  
She stepped outside into the consuming darkness.   
Against her better judgement she spoke one final thought to Iori, the air of calm and control she had built up shattered by the despairing glance she gave back over her shoulder.  
“What more could he do to me?”


	34. Supermassive Black Hole

The first thing Wallace saw when he opened his eyes was Mimi looking around the apartment, and he sighed with relief. The place was a mess, like it had been searched in a hurry, but it was definitely a Japanese style apartment and it could only be Tokyo Bay he could see out the window under the amber hues of the twilight sky. She spotted him and smiled.  
“Wallace, we made it! Yatta!” she cried in English and hugged him. Ordinarily a hug from her would have sent his mind racing, but he felt weird, like he needed space to breathe and so despite himself he pushed her away. Noticing a laptop sitting on the table nearby, Mimi thanked it with a little bow, “Arigato gozaimasu, Arisu-chan,”  
“Tondemonai…” came a weary voice from behind her, causing both of them to turn around in surprise and seek out its source.   
Wallace saw what the girl who had replied to Mimi was doing and for a moment he too felt as if he was going to do the same. Mimi almost caught the girl as she fell but to Wallace, her actions barely registered.   
All he saw was the girl toppling backwards, her golden hair dancing up over the face he thought he would never see in the flesh again.  
Reiko?  
No, the girl he had been so in love with that he had become fluent in Japanese at just ten years old would never have moved back to Tokyo.   
This was A.L.I:C.E. – the initial Computer Expert version of his Artificial Life-like Interface. Once he had had the life-like rendering program set up with thousands of possible combinations, he had input some initial features as a test. The long flowing blonde hair, the dazzling blue eyes and the dark dress of a girl who had been hounded from her Japanese homeland by schoolyard bullies who preyed on anyone different and other-worldly, they had been the exact features of his childhood girlfriend, and she had haunted the program ever since.   
Only now, her indefinable beauty was magnified as she appeared to be twice as old as Wallace had originally programmed, and now she had also taken on a physical form. But just because that form was attractive, it did not mean that Wallace needed to lose sight of what was important. The young woman lying supine before him had been a dangerous proposition when she had been contained in his laptop, but now that she was out…  
“Mimi,” he said when her fussing over the entity’s state of being finally registered, “maybe take a step back, we don’t know what she’s capable of,”  
“But she’s not breathing!”   
“For all we know she doesn’t need to,” he replied.  
She moved to take a pulse but Wallace held her back. “Let me,” he heard himself say as he crept towards the girl on the floor, admiring the quality and details of her form. She was far beyond the definition of anything he could have rendered.   
For a second he even thought that Alice’s apparent creation of a human form was pure fantasy, that this could only be a twenty-year-old version of the Reiko he had known, and that he was being decidedly perverted by studying her so clinically.   
Eventually he gathered the courage to touch two fingers to her carotid artery.  
He could not feel a thing.  
No pulse.   
No skin.   
No neck.  
He could not even hold her hand. He slipped right through her.  
“There is nothing I can do,” he said, realising that even he was out of his depth here.  
“We didn’t kill her, did we?” Mimi asked him, distraught. He really had no idea. If she was data taken physical form, the fact that it was still holding the image or projection or whatever she was might be a sign that her programming was still active. But the fact that she was unresponsive suggested otherwise.  
“Anohito wa daijoubudeshou,” came a voice from the doorway, seemingly indicating that the girl would be alright.  
Surprised again by a voice in the half-light of the apartment, both U.S. residents turned towards the sound, suddenly aware that whomever’s apartment this was, they had no reasonable explanation as to why they should be there.  
A figure stood there, arms folded. Thankfully she was instantly recognisable to the both of them, but the strangeness of the situation caused some hesitation. At least, there was hesitation from everyone except Mimi.  
She bounded over to the doorway and gave the girl a great big hug, before starting a very earnest conversation that was too fast and complex for Wallace to understand fully.  
He knew that Mimi had asked the girl how she was feeling, and it seemed like the girl had avoided the question, instead asking something to the effect of ‘What are you doing here?’  
Names like Koushiro and Yamato were thrown around, the effect of which completely sapped Mimi of any energy she looked to have had.  
The girl from the doorway turned her attention on Wallace, motioning from him to the girl and back. She asked him a question but the only word he picked up was ‘otousan’, the word for father.  
The question made Mimi laugh despite whatever the girl had told her a moment ago, and Wallace relaxed. If Mimi was happy, he was happy – and besides, he had a reputation to uphold. He walked over to her and grasped her hand in his, touching his lips to the back of it in a short bow.  
“Hikari-chan,” he said, looking back up at her with a smile that masked his nervousness, “Nagai toki… iie miru…?”  
Up close she looked just as attractive as the last time he had seen her, although she had a more refined look, facially, than nine-years-ago’s outright adorableness. Her jeans, loose t-shirt and practical backpack were a departure, as was the perceptibly tousled hair and the look of world weariness in her eyes. For a moment, he thought he had overstepped as a dark look flashed across her face.   
He let go of her hand.  
She spouted some Japanese at him that was too quick to comprehend.  
The look of confusion on his face made Mimi laugh again.  
“What did she say?” he asked, already beginning to feel embarrassed.  
“She said that your Japanese is atrocious! ‘Long’ then ‘time’ then ‘no’ and then just the verb ‘to see’ shoved together like an English sentence…” She shook her head in disbelief, “I totally agree with her,”  
“Well, you know I’ve been out of practice, can you translate for me?”  
She turned to Hikari and said, “He meant to say, ‘Hisashiburi’,”  
Hikari just looked at her until she realised.  
“Whoops, I meant to say…” she started before switching into Japanese.  
Hikari nodded and smiled briefly at him in response, though he felt as if it was out of politeness more than anything. Almost half a lifetime had passed since she had blushed at his affectionate goodbye, and it was more than likely that she was a different person now, but he could not help thinking that if Mimi did not want him, this trip to Tokyo should not be wasted.   
Suddenly she was pushing past him towards the window, muttering “Sore wa… nani…?” What’s that…?  
Mimi followed, and soon he too was looking out the window with them as they passed hushed conversation in their native tongue. It must have looked strange from the street, three people staring out at the darkness and trying to make sense of it, but once each of them spotted what was out there, they could not prise their eyes away.  
Wallace’s first thought had strangely been about time zones. Despite the fact that their trip to Japan had felt instantaneous, the thirteen-hour time difference should have plonked them down in the middle of the day, but as he had noted before the sun was setting.  
Or was it rising?  
A thought flashed into his mind about the time-sensitivity of those emails Koushiro had sent and his heart started beating a little faster. But before he could tell Mimi what it was that he needed to do or ask what day it was, he saw what the two girls were talking about, and he too became preoccupied.  
Punctuating the warm vista spread out above the city was a thin patch of pure darkness that seemed to be absorbing any and all light that hit it. Its savage blackness sent an involuntary chill over Wallace as he gazed into its depths.  
He caught a gesture from Hikari to Mimi out of the corner of his eye and strained to see what had sent them into a further state of shock. After a moment, he saw the lights of an aeroplane in the distance fly out from the edge of the saucer. A feeling of cold dread permeated his being.  
The plane must have flown behind the patch of darkness, which meant that the darkness was hanging in the air…  
Panic rising, he almost jumped out of his skin when the Interface appeared between him and Hikari, pulling her own hair into pigtails with an air of cold detachment.  
“She shouldn’t be here,” said Alice, darting her eyes toward Hikari. She snapped her second hair band in place with a flourish and the resemblance to Reiko faded away, a fact that disconcerted Wallace markedly less than his realisation that not only did Alice know Hikari, but that Hikari also knew Alice since she knew that Alice’s form would reanimate.   
That could only mean that Alice had walked the streets of Tokyo before, and that the program he had inadvertently brought to life had escaped his wifi-disabled laptop even after he had taken the battery out, and that she had done so without his say-so or knowledge. The level of power required for code to escape from dead circuitry, that she clearly possessed, was unimaginable. Add that to a purely logical mind with no morals or emotions, and all manner of terrifying things were possible.  
He was in mental freefall.   
Koushiro had said that something made it through… something evil that had taken human form… that that something knew he was trying to stop it, and that it had killed already…  
As his mind raced, Alice shrugged before saying something which confirmed all of his fears.  
“But now that I’ve opened up that portal to Hell, there’s no point sending her back, is there?”


	35. If You Could Only See

I was careful to put the overly large backpack on the floor of the train, between the four of us, as we rode the three stops across the Rainbow Bridge and into Odaiba. I had gotten past the point of caring about the chaos that was the strange coincidences in my life. I guessed that I had been returned from the digital world specifically to Ichiro’s apartment because that was the last place I had physically been in the human world, and that probably held true for the strange girl when she had picked up Wallace and Mimi from New York. When they questioned her about how long it had taken her to get them here, she had complained about the effort in carrying two unwieldy lumps of flesh instead of one, many thousands of times the distance of her last errand. I was just thankful she admitted that it was her who had ripped open the fabric of reality and not me.  
There were worse places than the Ocean that that menacing hole in the sky could have led to.  
The early morning commuters were steadfastly ignoring the gaping tear in the sky that was hanging ominously outside the carriage windows. They were more interested in the blond foreigner travelling with a blonde local dressed as a goth and a girl in a little black cocktail dress with unbearably pink hair, who kept sniffing loudly to fight off her tears. But just as they were able to ignore the hole in the sky, we were able to ignore their furtive looks.  
The news that Yamato was dead and Taichi had killed him had hit Mimi hard, as I knew it would, but I had not realised that she had only just learned of Koushiro’s fate as well. Had I known that, I might have found a more tactful way to allay Wallace’s irrational fears that Alice was going around killing people, than to simply say that she was with me when Yamato was murdered.  
Seeing her slump to the ground in shock and agony had been truly awful and even though part of that agony was fuelled by her ignorance of what was truly going on, I could not bear to tell her anything about the entity inside Taichi or the fact that he had probably killed my boyfriend too, or where I had been since that horrid incident.  
I wanted to tell her everything, but I knew now was not the time.  
In the end all I had said was that Sora had gotten away, but I hadn’t been able to contact her since.  
Besides which, I myself was still coming to terms with what I had seen and learned after I had been saved from an eternity of watching blurry soccer in the dream world. In the scheme of things, not telling an old friend the entire truth about the danger she had put herself in by coming to Tokyo right now to save her some anguish and worry, was not that big of a deal.  
The only problem was that it meant I had no excuse to leave her behind when I left for Koushiro’s. I had tried to make her stay to keep her safe, telling her that I could handle my brother alone, but as soon as I mentioned Koushiro’s apartment, Wallace had said something about emails and she had become determined to not only go with me, but to take him and the Alice-girl with us.  
I eventually caved.  
Taking them to where Taichi was was likely to be putting them in great danger, but so long as I was with them they would be safe.  
It was me he wanted.  
I worried though. The last two times he had been in a room with girls from our destined group, he had tried to seduce us, and the last few times he had been alone in a room with guys from our group, they had been met with knives in the back. With Mimi visibly distraught beside me, I wondered how strong her resolve would be if he gambled on his honeyed words once again.  
“So Mimi, what’s the deal with you and Golden Boy over here?” I asked, trying to convey a tone that said I was trying to take her mind off what had happened, rather than actually pumping her for information.  
She sniffed and looked at me sideways.  
“Don’t get your hopes up; he was in love with me from the moment we met,” she gave me a conspiratorial smile. I was glad that I had enticed her into the conversation, even if it was not in the direction I wanted. “What is it with you and blond boys?”  
“My boyfriend was dark, thank you very much,” I said, my offense overriding my urge to interrogate her instead, “and besides, I’m still mourning for Daisuke,”  
“Golden Boy would be more than willing to take him off your mind, trust me,”  
“But I thought you said he loved you?”  
“He doesn’t love me, he loves the idea of me, the Japanese-ness of me – you can see it in everything he does. Kissing you on the hand as soon as he saw you, making his computer program look like her, and then wishing really hard so she would come to life…” she lowered her voice to a whisper, “Clearly he’s too big of a weeaboo to take seriously…”  
I was thrown just enough by her mid-sentence slip into English that I missed my chance to ask exactly what she meant by her suggestion that Wallace had created Alice when she herself had claimed to have a mother. Mimi sighed as we pulled up to our stop, and before I could compose myself we were caught in the mad crush to exit the carriage.  
Mimi’s dress had been a problem throughout the journey, with creepy businessmen ‘accidentally’ knocking into her and lingering against her far longer than warranted, and so the three of us formed a triangle around her as we were squished through the doors. Mimi had her hands on Wallace’s back, and Alice and I were behind her, with me clutching Ichiro’s rucksack to my chest and the blonde girl affecting the same cool air of indifference she had had for the entirety of our journey.  
It was not as if I had not tried to find Mimi a change of clothes, but no matter how hard I looked I could not find the pale-yellow blouse I had been wearing the night I had torn apart my brother’s room in search of alcohol. This was despite the fact that the contents of Ichiro’s wardrobe and laundry basket were strewn across his apartment in a similar fashion, and could be catalogued with a mere glance.  
With her unwillingness to wear any of his t-shirts or my jeans, I had instead used the short span of time we had left before we caught the train to place some more food into the bag. The kitchen area had scarcely been touched compared to the rest of the apartment, and in a moment of forward-thinking genius I grabbed the bottle of sake Ichiro told me he had been given on his eighteenth birthday as well.  
The added melancholy of realising that it was never going to be opened on that ‘special occasion’ he was saving it for was unpleasant, but in the end it had only steeled my resolve to do what was necessary.

Right now though, as we emerged into the open air that melancholy was forgotten, if only for a moment. Through the crowds of faceless salarymen I thought I recognised a black leather jacket, out of place amongst the hundreds of cheap suits.   
I followed after it and the shock of flowing dark hair I convinced myself I had seen trailing after, all thoughts of shielding my friend lost.  
“Hikari!” She cried as I searched for another glimpse of the jacket, but I had lost sight of it. Turning back to see what the commotion was behind me, I saw Mimi and Wallace holding a once again unconscious blonde girl and I made a split-second decision to ditch them.  
“Sorry,” I replied to the protestations behind me as I awkwardly half-jogged after my quarry, dodging an only slightly thinning crowd, “but this is safer for everyone,”  
Alice would return from her fainting spell, but if I didn’t hurry after this spectre of hope that somehow Ichiro had survived my brother’s wrath right now, I would never know if I had seen what I thought I had seen, or if more visions from my dream world had followed me back here to the human one.  
If they had followed me it meant that my jump back had caused more damage to the fabric of reality than I had bargained on. I had been willing to accept that the price for my return meant that portals could be opened again, but there was always the risk that that one trip could rip open the fabric of reality for good. And that was before Alice tore a hole in the sky.  
I hoped against hope that who I had seen was the real Ichiro as I moved towards where I thought he was headed. I thought back to his trashed apartment and realised that I had not seen his jacket amongst his scattered wardrobe. It was entirely possible that he had somehow got away from the thing Taichi had been turning into, come back to the apartment to find me gone, trashed the place and left wearing his favourite jacket. I put any questions of what it would mean for him to have escaped that no-win scenario out of my mind, simply because the alternative would be so much worse. Him possibly being in league with Taichi or having amazing evasive skills were both on a level I could handle, but realities colliding were another matter entirely.  
My worry was short lived though, as the crowd thinned I spied the figure in the jacket again and realised they weren’t quite as tall as my boyfriend had been and their hair was only shoulder length.   
Annoyed that I had gotten my hopes up and worried unnecessarily, I decided to make the most of my head start to Koushiro’s apartment. If I could get there and stop Taichi from whatever it was he had been trying to do remotely from Sorato’s apartment before Mimi and company arrived there too, they would never have to be put in any danger at all.   
The figure wearing a carbon-copy of my boyfriend’s favourite jacket struggled along the pavement and to my surprise turned into the Izumi’s apartment building before me. A strange coincidence, but in a city as big as Tokyo two people going to the same place at the same time was hardly all that noteworthy. As I passed them on my way to the staircase I could not help but risk a quick glance towards them as they waited for the elevator. At that moment they turned away from me and dumped an energy drink into the bin I had just passed and I hurried on, realising with further annoyance that I’d mistaken a woman for a man I knew intimately.  
Cursing myself for my stupidity once again, I laboured up the stairs with my cumbersome pack and exited on the top floor only to find that the woman was already there. Her jet-black hair was combed around in front of her face in a manner that struck me as odd for some reason. There was also something odd about how her hand was hovering in front of the Izumi’s crime-scene-tape adorned door, switching between a fist and open palm, as if she was unsure whether to knock or enter unannounced. But there was no reason to think anyone would be inside, was there?   
I couldn’t tell if the tape was broken or not from where I was. Maybe if it was it would explain her interest in his apartment, but regardless of her motivation I could not let her inside.  
I called out a hushed “hey, get away from there,” and she turned towards me.   
Instantly, I knew why I’d found her hairstyle odd.   
I was used to it being tucked behind her ears, and decidedly more ginger.  
“Where have you been?!” she replied at a similar volume, astonished.   
She slunk over to me and embraced me almost unwillingly. “I was so worried about you,” she said as I pushed away from her. This was the fourth hug I’d received in the past day or so, and the other real one had only happened an hour ago – I didn’t need it, and besides, it didn’t feel like she wanted to give it. She wouldn’t even look me in the eye.  
“Me? What happened to you?” I took a step back and took this Sora in. Dark hair, dark circles under her eyes and dark jeans all made the pale, slightly too small, yellow blouse she was wearing under the leather jacket stand out. It was a combination severely out of character for someone whose tomboy-chic styles were famous in the fashion industry for their understatement.   
I mean, the jacket is the same as Ichiro’s, I thought to myself, and that blouse looks like it could be mine and we have very different tastes in clothes… And why would she dye her hair?  
She leant against the wall beside me.   
“Yesterday morning the police sent out a plea for help locating us in connection with Yamato’s death, and our photos ended up plastered everywhere,” she pulled her hair back behind her ears. Despite now looking more like the Sora I knew, the return to her more familiar look made her appear even more shattered in contrast. “Takeru was paranoid about a phone call from his mother, so we took his car from Jou’s and ditched it at Ichiro’s and used the hair dye we’d found and a few bits of clothing to disguise ourselves – we figured that you wouldn’t miss them, what with you in the wind and no way for Ichiro to have survived… – and it worked, no-one looked at us twice on the train to Iori’s,”  
“What’s this about Jou?” I asked, struggling to follow what was going on.  
“Well after… ‘the incident’, Takeru wanted to see you, but you were gone, and he started getting a bit frantic, so I told him to take me to Jou’s where I ended up passing out from drinking too much of the beer he had bought for some party he was going to have before all of this… He’s a fugitive from the police as well now – turned out Takeru was right about his mother”  
Jou on the run. I could scarcely believe it.  
“Is he–” I remembered myself, “Are they all okay?”  
Sora took the time to yawn excessively before she replied, still staring absently out over my shoulder, “Hopefully they’ve all stayed put but they could be out trying to catch mist with their bare hands for all I know, I haven’t seen them for a whole four hours…”  
“Sora,” I ventured, seeing her wobble slightly, even though she was being supported by the wall, “you didn’t walk here did you?” Iori lived in Nerima, and if she had left at three in the morning, there wouldn’t have been any trains running.  
“Yeah,” she laughed wearily, “I haven’t slept since I passed out either, and I’ve still got a massive hangover as well,” she pushed herself off the wall and steadied herself, “but I’m the only one that can get through to him to stop this madness,”  
I put a hand on her shoulder.  
“It’s okay Sora, you can stay here and rest, I’m sure I can–”  
“No,” she said forcefully, pushing me away, “And don’t you dare say anything about how I don’t know how much danger I’m putting myself in, or that it’s a lost cause – I wasn’t watching on a screen,” she said looking at me square in the eye for the first time, “You didn’t have to step around the faceless cadaver of a man you shared everything with for the better part of a decade to leave the room, but I did. I had to face that the only other man who came close to sharing that same level of intimacy with me, had made me want to betray him minutes before he killed him. And then, after your brother pleaded with me that something else was going on and I didn’t listen, it was my anger that forced those wings and horns out of him,”  
She had rendered me speechless, and worked herself to the point of tears in her rage, “I made him have to go through that, Hikari. I was the one who saw him in pain, heard those tormented screams when he realised what he’d done – and I didn’t think…”  
“You can’t think like… you couldn’t have known…”   
I couldn’t think of anything to say that would calm her, or make her understand that I understood how she was feeling.  
“And your boyfriend, when he told me to run I didn’t realise he wouldn’t follow…” her eyes softened, looking for forgiveness and then answers as she asked, “What made him think that my future of trying to live with all this pain and guilt was worth the loss of his own?”  
“He wouldn’t have thought about it like that. He just wanted to make sure you were safe. That’s always been his thing…” I had to stop there for fear of mirroring my companion’s emotional display. I had done enough though, because Sora had calmed back down and was once again readying herself to enter the Izumi’s apartment.  
“Now it’s my turn to repay the favour,” she said with an air of finality that I wasn’t sure I understood.  
“But wait,” I said grabbing her wrist as she turned away from me, “I can’t let you just go in there, do you even have a plan?”  
She nodded slightly in answer, then shook her head, “Do you know what it is that’s taken your bother over?”  
The real question was, did she? I thought back to the shaky laptop webcam footage I’d seen of her looking back at Taichi, at the shadows that I couldn’t make out in the chaos bursting out of him. But she had seen what they were, and what she had seen had made her run, instantly.   
She knew.  
I nodded.  
She told me her plan. It was the same as mine had been, except for a few key details.  
I turned around and searched my bag.  
“No, not… Ah! There it is…” I muttered, turning back to her and proffering the bottle of sake. She took it from me with unspoken understanding.  
Sora had nothing else to lose, and nowhere else to go should she fail, and that meant that she was our best chance of quelling the beast inside my brother.   
I saw it now. The battle for Taichi’s soul was hers, not mine.  
After all, if there was one person who could possibly defeat the Demon Lord of Wrath with mere words, it was the Destined Child of Love.


	36. Crash

Foreign keystrokes echoed off the once welcoming walls of the Izumi apartment.  
The nauseating sense of déja vu I felt as I spied, slightly crouched, through a crack in the door was only surpassed by the images of Koushiro slumped at his computer that kept springing unbidden into my head.  
I tried to concentrate on the differences. The person in the chair in the scene before me was alive, he was working at the same computer but today it was also connected to a laptop, and it was Sora cautiously approaching him with a bottle of sake, not Takeru or Iori trying to get an imaginary confession out of Koushiro.  
“Taichi, are you… is it…”  
The dark wings seated at Koushiro’s computer twitched at Sora’s voice.  
The constant tapping stopped and my brother’s voice broke the momentary silence.  
“What are you doing here?”  
He still sounded like himself. I wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or not.  
“You’re all I have left…” she said reluctantly.  
“What? I don’t…” he moved to massage his temples as he swivelled the chair toward Sora and I saw that his hands were now dreadfully clawed and had broken out in a thick matting of dark hair. He was obviously still getting used to his transformation, because instead of actually massaging his temples, all he managed to do was poke himself in the side of the head.  
Cursing like the brother I knew, he took a couple of deep breaths and balled up his fists as best he could before he continued. “I’m sorry, you’re going to have to help me understand… I’ve been trying to type all night with these–” he sprung his claws out, “–things, and it’s been doing my head in. I can’t reconcile what you just said with where we left things two days ago… you shouldn’t even be able to be in the same room as me, let alone…”  
She leant against the edge of the desk beside him. My heart was hammering inside my chest, I could only imagine what hers was doing.  
“It’s okay, I can–” she sighed, “I can explain”  
I readied myself. This could go wrong at any moment.  
“Earlier tonight I felt like the most broken person in the world, like there had never been anyone feeling as awful and hopeless as I did–”  
“Is that why you dyed your hair?” he interrupted.  
“What? No, that happened before… Do you mind? I’m trying to bare my soul here…” she said, gripping the bottle a bit tighter.  
Don’t let him get you angry, I thought at her, remember what I told you after I gave you that bottle.  
He apologised and she took a deep breath before continuing.  
“So I figured that if I truly was feeling that way, what was the point in going on? What you…” she stopped to correct herself, “what that thing inside you did to me, by doing what it did to Yamato – I could not think of anything worse for someone to have to go on living with for the rest of their lives. You broke more than just his neck, my heart and any chance of getting back together with us – you tainted the memory of all the good times we ever had together before that.  
“Do you remember the first time all three of us slept in the same bed? Because now I can’t even think about how happy I was waking up next to the two people I loved most, knowing they loved me and each other just as much as I loved them without wondering if that happiness was worth the pain it’s caused me. After we lost everything else three years ago, the three of us being together was supposed to fix that hurt but now it’s just made everything so, so much worse.  
“Last night, it was all I could think about. I felt like it was not possible for anyone in the world to be living in any more pain than I was. So, I decided that I shouldn’t have to. Lying there next to Jou as he tried to wordlessly tell me that everything would be alright, I decided that I would kill myself.”  
I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. I had thought that she would be stronger than this. I had even used that exact thought to get me out of my own hell, without a doubt in my mind that she would be fine. I wanted to go to her, to tell her that I could help her, that I had been going through these same feelings myself, that I could see the light at the end of the tunnel and that with time, she would too.  
I would never have let her in there if I’d known just how deeply broken she was. And I should have known. It was stupid of me and I hated myself for it, but there was nothing I could do now without screwing her plan up even worse.  
All of this ran through my head in an instant before she continued.  
“But something in me knew that those feelings were selfish, and that there had to be someone out there feeling worse than I was. I decided that I was going to search until I found them, so I could see what it was that kept them going, so that I too could keep on keeping on,”  
I could hear in her voice that she was on the verge of tears, and considering the depths of the emotion she was expressing, I could not blame her.  
“And then I had this crazy thought. What if that person was you? What if while it was in control, you were conscious? I imagined you watching as your own hands moved toward my neck, as powerless to stop it from hurting me as you had been seconds before when your foot came down and, and…”  
There was no stopping the tears now, from her or me. I had not even considered the waking hellscape my own brother must have been going through. What kind of a sister did that make me?  
“And then I remembered the way you had reacted when you came to,” she continued through her sobs, “and I knew it had to be true, and I felt awful about how much I had been pitying my lot, when what you had to have been going through was so much worse. I knew then that I had to see you and try to help you through this nightmare… or die trying,”  
The two of them lapsed into a natural silence. A tear ran down Taichi’s downcast face and Sora leant down and wiped it away, the edges of her mouth twitching upward briefly as she did so.  
Taichi raised his eyes to meet hers and they shared a look that communicated so much that I could not begin to imagine. I saw the bottle in her hands and realised that she did not even need it, she had managed to quell the demon inside him without letting his defences down at all. The fact that I thought getting him drunk first was even necessary was proof I would not have been up to the task.  
I heard footsteps approaching from behind and instantly forgot my self-pity in favour of startled panic. I whipped around to see Mimi striding towards me with fists balled in fury. She was followed by Wallace with a look of ill-suited determination.  
In contrast, Alice skipped down the short hallway and positively beamed at the sight of me. It was an image so out of place with everything I had seen of her in our limited meetings that even though I had a strong sense that Mimi was about to berate me for ditching them earlier, I did not manage the necessary sign language to get her to keep quiet in time.  
I will never know what it was that made Sora speak at that exact moment. Whether she also heard their footsteps and sought to retain Taichi’s focus so that the interests of his inner demon would not be piqued, or whether it was just logically the next step she had planned to get him on-side – her query of ‘So where do we go from here?’ perfectly overlapped Mimi’s ‘What the hell was that back there?’ to me. Thankfully, Sora’s voice also caused Mimi to heed the finger I raised to my lips.  
I turned back toward the slit in the door, staying in my half-crouched position, and saw that Taichi was not completely oblivious to the commotion. He was squinting in my direction. I knew he should not be able to see me from where I was, but I also knew that that did not mean he did not know I was there.  
I froze. If he had sensed me through a hacked webcam feed before, what was stopping him from knowing where I was right now?  
Acting with the impulses of someone super jacked on energy drinks, as she was at the moment, Sora jumped off the side of the table and turned Taichi’s body back towards the computer to ask him what he was doing on there.  
Danger averted for another moment, I breathed an internal sigh of relief as he began explaining that her two questions had related answers.  
“Despite what you always say, I’m not completely stupid…” he began as Mimi bent down and squeezed her head into the gap between my stomach and the door to see what was going on. Wallace leant over the top of me to do the same. I was vaguely aware of his junk being a little too close to my chest for someone I’d only met once nine years ago, but I tried to ignore it as Taichi continued, “… I know I have to do something about all this,” he twitched his wings and gestured to the horns sticking out of his head with his clawed mitts, “because even after all the binge drinking to get him out of my head, all the force of my stupid human sized will and determination, and all the attempts at trying to reconnect with my humanity; he is still here. And nothing I have tried yet has made any difference.  
“So this is my last shot, if I can’t get this program to open the gate to the digital world, I think I may just kill us all… and if I can go back, I’m never going to see another human being for the rest of my life,”  
Mimi stifled a gasp from below me. I had never heard my brother sound so beaten, or so distraught. I wanted to go to him and tell him everything would be okay, but I knew it would not. Even if his plan worked, now that I had broken the seal on the two worlds there was nothing stopping him from breaking back out once his alter-ego took back control. If only I had ignored Jackie and stayed put, his plan might have succeeded.  
“But Sora, if there’s nothing left here for you but me,” he continued, “and if the fact that I’m not trying to kill you anymore is anything to go by…”  
“Of course I’ll go with you,” she pre-empted, lightly grasping his wicked hands, “how could I do anything less?”  
Another tear rolled down Taichi’s cheek, but this time it came to rest on the edge of a hopeful half-smile.  
Despite my misgivings about his plan, and the weirdness I felt spying on yet another intimate moment between the two of them, I actually had a sense of something warm spreading through me. It started between my shoulder blades at about the size of a one-yen coin and spread wider as it moved out towards my chest until I felt like I was bursting with joy for the two of them being able to share this moment together, especially after all they had been through.  
Their special moment was interrupted by the strange dan-dun of the computer’s notification system, and suddenly the warmth I was feeling turned to ice as many very strange things happened all in succession.  
“Eh!?” came the voice from below, and I looked down, expecting to see Mimi, but instead getting a face full of Alice’s back, her lower torso seemingly sharing the same space as mine and her head occupying space on the other side of the ninety-nine percent closed door, as if she had wondered what the fuss was all about and just popped herself through me and the door to find out.  
I prayed that Mimi’s voice had been misheard once again and looked back up through the crack to see Sora transfixed by the screen. Her hand reaching out to touch it almost in slow motion as Taichi turned toward us and the glaring giveaway that was Alice’s shockingly blonde head. A head which – even as I tried in vain to pull the weightless ghost of a girl back through to our side of the door; my hands slipping through her just as her entire body had slipped through me – began spurting forth nonsense at high volume.  
「REBOOT INTERRUPTED」  
Shit shit shit! I saw my brother’s eyes glaze over into a solid neon blue and the fear from three years ago came flooding back.  
「ERROR. SOURCE 1 CORRUPTED」  
There was no hiding now. No hope for a passive solution.  
Daemon was well and truly in control.  
「ATEMPTING TO EXTRAPOLATE SOURCE 1 FROM SOURCE 8」  
Panicking, I stood abruptly, and a jolt of intense pain cracked into the top of my skull. In a daze, I stumbled through the door with Wallace, who I could just make out clutching his chin as he tripped forwards with me.  
「ERROR. CANNOT EXTRAPOLATE SOURCE 1 FROM SOURCE 8 AT THIS TIME」  
I regained focus and yelled at a bewildered Sora to get out of harm’s way, but she seemed more interested in the hand she had reached out towards the computer – inspecting the back of it like it was something she thought she knew better.  
But the demon was not interested in her at the moment. It still had its neon eyes trained on mine, now twisting my brother’s mouth into a wicked, inhuman grin. But it was me who should have been smiling.  
「RELIABILITY NOT YET CONFIRMED. FRIENDSHIP NOT REQUIRED」  
Alice’s megaphonic interruptions were just white noise now as I readied myself for that thing to make its move.  
Bang!  
An almighty crash rocked the building and again I found myself off balance, this time struggling to see what had blown a hole in the wall through the pieces of it that had been instantly turned to dust and were now obscuring my view.  
「ERROR. SOURCE 1 CORRUPTED」  
I glanced back over at the demon and saw Sora studying the bottle of sake in her other hand, as if she was trying to read it upside down – oblivious to the fact that with Daemon distracted, now was the perfect time to get away. The dust began to settle slightly, and I could just make out the silhouette of some sort of caped crusader, hovering outside the space where the Izumi’s wall used to be. But before I, it, or the Lord of Wrath could mount an offensive, Sora struck.  
「ATEMPTING TO EXTRAPOLATE SOURCE 1 FROM SOURCE 8」  
Alcohol and shards of glass sprayed everywhere as the sake bottle splintered over the back of the demon’s head. But despite using a similar weapon and (I assumed) a similar area of attack to Ichiro in her apartment couple of days ago, Sora’s violent outburst proved to be far from a knockout blow.  
In an instant Daemon had turned and backhanded her across the room, narrowly missing Wallace as she cannoned into the far wall.  
「ERROR. CANNOT EXTRAPOLATE SOURCE 1 FROM SOURCE 8 AT THIS TIME」  
In a flap of wings, the amalgam of data and chromosome was through the hole in the wall and out into the morning sky, sucking out the remaining airborne dust with it. I was vaguely aware of Mimi wailing at Wallace and I, and anyone else, to help her with Sora.  
At the same time there was a voice at the back of my head calling out to me softly, saying my name like I should know what I must do, and Alice continuing on with her own vie for attention.  
「ATTEMPTING FORCE REBOOT」  
I turned around to see how bad Sora’s injuries were; partly because I cared about her and was hoping against hope that she was not hurt, and partly to feed my own guilt.  
When I saw her – unconscious and slumped forward, blood steadily dribbling out of her mouth – I felt like I was back in the dream world surrounded by that ever-rising snowdrift; frozen to the spot in the same surrounds.  
Mimi’s usually immaculate hands were slick with red as she tended to Sora. Her screams for help bringing a rush of footsteps only just discernible over the clamour of the battle outside.  
The hurried footsteps sent an image of the terror from a couple of days ago back into my mind, and for a moment I even expected Ichiro to be the one pushing through the door to save her, but it was only a curiously dark haired Takeru.  
He called out to me, wanting to know what was going on, but my attention was back on Mimi who was now cry-asking, “Why? Why is there so much blood?!”  
And suddenly Jou was there to reassure her that everything was going to be fine, as Takeru kept asking me what was going on. I wanted to run, I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could. Away from what my inaction and hope for a pacifistic solution had wrought. But all I could manage was to stagger backwards, mortified, away from the gory scene.  
There was no way Sora was getting out of here alive, was there? Jou’s reassurances sounded hollow and fraudulent when juxtaposed with the scene before us and the sheer amount of blood that had poured out of her mouth.  
I couldn’t have done anything about Daisuke or Koushiro or Yamato, but it was my call to let Sora go into this room alone, and my fault for not stepping in sooner to save her.  
Her death would be on my hands.  
I stepped backwards in shock as Iori appeared from nowhere and handed Jou a bag of ice. Everyone but me was doing something, so why was the only action I felt I could take to back away?  
Even Wallace was wrestling with a Japanese keyboard and user interface to try and… well, I could only guess he was doing something urgent on the two connected computers; considering there was a young woman bleeding to death behind him.  
Scanning the room, it was only Takeru who seemed to be stuck in one spot doing nothing productive. I looked at him in my daze. He was still yelling something at me but it did not seem to be getting through. To avoid looking him directly in his eyes, I stared at his lips like I used to in another life. Wondering how they felt, wondering what they could do, wondering what they would say…  
They seemed to be asking me what I was doing.  
‘Nothing’ was the answer to that question, but even as that answer popped into my head something else was telling me that it was wrong.  
 _Hikari_ , purred the voice at the back of my head and I turned around abruptly, suddenly remembering what it was that I was backing towards.  
The open air greeted me with hostilities raging between my demonic brother and his shiny helmeted opponent. I paused on the edge of the apartment and watched the battle in my daze.  
Where had this new hero come from?  
There was no way the Digimon had only just come through from the digital world, no way it had followed me back. There were no conditioned fighters like this over there.  
And yet, that only left the possibility that it had been here for a very long time – the partner of someone who did not know we were closing the gate for good.  
A well-aimed slash from the newcomer cut into the side of its opponent as the demon made a double-fisted attempt on its head, and something liquid squirted out. Daemon faltered as its disguise became its weakness, but I found it hard to celebrate. Though its mind was all extra-dimensional evil, the damage had been done to the part that was still my brother. If he truly was already gone, at least his own relative fragility was helping to destroy his inner tormentor.  
The question of what it meant if he was not truly gone was a bit trickier, and I did not want to have to deal with it. For a moment it looked like I would not have to as Daemon kept falling. The helmeted hero dived down after the villain, arm extended in the shape of a blaster, blue light growing brighter from its muzzle as the gap between the two fighters narrowed. But as the killing blow was about to be dealt – hand cannon inches from the back of the demon’s head – the limp Lord twisted in an instant and planted a whirlwind fast kick to its assailant’s jaw.  
The blow sent the hero into a high parabolic arc.  
 _Hikariii_ , came the voice from the back of my head again as Daemon readied an expanding ball of fire in its right claw. Still frozen by the craziness of the situation, all I felt I could do was will the downed fighter to wake up before the demon could end it.  
But end it it did. Once loosed, the fireball was dart-like and exploded into the futuristic fighter just as it hit the top of its arc, the shockwave forcing me to avert my eyes. When I looked back up, I found myself watching as two figures fell through the sky, one a small tumbling ball of flickering data, the other a humanoid in a reverse swan dive.  
My bag jolted backwards, as padded claws clutched at my head. That voice at the back of my head now coming from slightly higher, saying the things my brain was struggling to process, _If he hits the ground he’ll die, we have to move now!_  
There was no other option. Suddenly my hand was in my pocket, fishing out my device.  
The young man kept falling, hair trailing his form. Long, black and veil-like.  
A lightning fast blur of white jumped over me into the fifth storey air. I raised my arm and the dawn sky was lit up by a shining orb of light. Turning away from the brilliance, I saw Takeru’s dumbstruck face and I knew I could not just stand idle.  
The cat was quite literally out of the bag and he would be wanting answers.  
Without a thought of the consequences, I followed my heart’s desire, and jumped.  
For a gorgeous moment there was nothing but wind.  
The sound. The rush. The freedom.  
Then I hit my target; scrabbling around for a fist-full of pink fur to stop from bouncing off. I held on tight, wrapping my legs around the enormous torso to steady myself as best I could as we set off immediately towards the flickering purple ball.  
One hand anchoring me, I reached out with the other and clutched the little guy to my chest, scratching my chin with its nail-like horn in the process.  
But the falling man was in more danger. He was below the level of the hole they’d blown in the side of the apartment building now and had not shown any signs of consciousness as he fell.  
I held on for dear life as we careened down through the air. Floors of the apartment block whizzed past as we gained on his limp form and he involuntarily gained on his final destination.  
We had almost reached him when I felt us pulling up. My heart in my mouth as increased g-forces forced me to flatten into my dragon’s back, I had no idea if she’d caught him or not. There had been a sickening crunch before we rose, and I searched behind us to find its source. I glimpsed a depression and a rapidly dwindling flame and took it as both a relief and a warning.  
Looking up I saw the demon readying another fireball, a hateful scowl distorting the last vestiges of my brother’s features as the bastardised hybrid of data and DNA rocketed towards us.  
It released its payload and suddenly I found myself upside down as Magnadramon jack-knifed back towards our pursuer. She twisted back level in an instant, but not before I felt the heat from the fireball as it powered under my unprotected back.  
I barely had time to register my nausea or the fact that we had passed Daemon with our stomach-churning manoeuvre; when we turned around again to find ourselves aimed directly at the back of the defenceless demon.  
Through my straining legs I felt the pulse twist through my partner’s torso and then saw it spiral out of her mouth and slam into its intended target.  
This time when I looked down at the pavement the depression bore no flames of warning. Just the twitching outline of a body that used to belong to my brother and the wings of the thing that had corrupted it.


	37. Your Woman

_Send him in_ , she heard herself say when she was alerted to the fact that he had slept on the floor outside her room all night. Her dutiful older brother acquiesced, and her dutiful sisters rose to help her father from the room, knowing full well that the forthcoming conversation did not require their presence.  
She herself found the remote to her bed and raised herself to a seated position as the one she loved shuffled into the room awkwardly.  
“How did you sleep?” she began reflexively, and immediately regretted it. It was nowhere near where she had wanted to start.  
“How did I? …” he boggled, “How did you?”  
“I… I’m still exhausted, but I slept,”  
She could tell he wanted to come over and sit with her, hold her, comfort her, but after the way she had pushed him away last night he was clearly unsure of where he stood. Decisions she made after the feverish dreams of her epidural not quite coming back to haunt her, but still not feeling like the best way to have gone about things.  
“About last night,” she started, “I shouldn’t have been so abrupt, I’m sorry,”  
But being abrupt wasn’t really what wanted to apologise for. She wanted to apologise for everything; for starting a relationship with him when she knew fully well he was engaging in carnal acts with another man; for the years of emotional manipulation she had enacted to force him to like her; for changing herself to seem more attractive to him; for telling him she was on the pill when they first had sex, hoping that becoming pregnant would be the tie that bound them together for eternity.  
Mostly though, she wanted to apologise to alleviate the intense guilt she had been feeling ever since the twins had been cut from her belly.  
But before she knew it he was telling her it was alright, that she had been exhausted from such an emotionally and physically draining experience, and that no-one could ever blame her for how she had acted in that state. But he still stood there in the doorway, clutching at an elbow like he was a child who had been pushed off some play equipment by his only friend.  
“You shouldn’t make excuses for me. You deserve better,”  
The spell broken, he rushed over to embrace her, telling her that it was okay, that she was the better that she thought he deserved, but still she pushed him away.  
“You don’t get it do you?”  
He paused at the side of her bed, his words carefully chosen, “What I get is that after whatever happened yesterday…”  
 _What did he mean by that?_  
“You think that it would change the way I feel about you, and you’re just completely wrong,”  
She could hardly believe what she was hearing. He actually thought this was about the kids? Had no one told him anything? She thought back to last night, how it must have seemed from his point of view.  
Part of herself knew that she should tell him; her own advice to Hikari from a week ago leaping into her mind; but Hikari was missing and two more of their friends had died since she had boldly proclaimed those words as truth.  
He didn’t need honesty, he needed to be true to who he was and being with her was stopping him from doing that. Sure, ending her relationship with the only person she had ever truly loved was going to be hard on her, especially now, but deep down she knew she would be able to get through it.  
If honesty was the pillar of a good relationship it made sense that lying would ruin one. And the lie she was about to tell was going to slice open his heart viscerally.


	38. Torn

Ken walked as briskly as his melancholy would allow, but there was no escaping the fact that he had nowhere to go.  
Eight and a half months.  
Not exactly a long relationship by any stretch of the imagination, but as he had already established last night, time was meaningless. It produced no measure of meaning or emotion; just hands on a clock that was probably broken anyway.  
She had told him flat out that her love for him had died with the twins, and she never wanted to see him again, lest he continue to remind her of what she had lost.  
A lot of emotions had coursed through him at that moment, but words eluded him.  
Part of it was incomprehension at her own lack of understanding. Had he not lost just as much as she had last night? He’d also lost a brother. He’d failed to save that girl back in ’05. He’d lost his otherworldly partner, just like they all had. And just recently, he’d lost a lover. His relationship was supposed to help him build something good for once, rather than the net negative influence on the world he’d always felt his life was, and it didn’t take someone with the grades he had always received to realise that in that scenario the twins had been the symbolic embodiment of that good growing inside Miyako.  
But he couldn’t be mad at her, not after what she had just gone through. The emotions she must have been feeling after spending eight and a half months creating life from within and then having it all ripped away from her. If she thought cutting him out of her life was the best way for her to deal with it, how could he say no?  
What did it matter that he had gone to work instead of university so he could hope to provide some sort of financial support for her and the kids? What did it matter that she was the only positive thing in his life, and that he longed to be there for her until his dying breath?  
What he felt and what he had done were inconsequential.  
He had been the one cheating on her.  
He had been the one who had not gathered the courage to propose.  
In the end he had no right to make it about him, so he had left.  
How long it had been before he saw the hole in the sky he did not know; though judging by his current surroundings it was long enough to get him halfway to the Rainbow Bridge. He didn’t pay it much attention. He’d had enough heavy-handed symbolism for one day, and there was still plenty of the day left to be had.  
He turned back to the path ahead physically and mentally as he tried to shift his focus onto what he would do with his life now that yet another defining part had been ripped out of it, and walked into a man wearing a Teenage Wolves shirt.  
He hurried past with a “Watch where you’re going, jerk,” and snapped Ken out of his forlorn bubble for a moment as a wave of déjà vu swept over him. Almost exactly the same thing had happened as he left the hospital, only it had been an offensive gesture rather than a verbal attack.  
A woman that time, also wearing a shirt with a design centred around Yamato’s band.  
There had been an awful lot of Wolves fans passively declaring that they were in mourning through their choice of shirt, now that he thought about it. In fact, he was approaching a group of about five of them now.  
What a life he was living when the amount of people wearing a certain type of t-shirt weirded him out more than the gaping black hole looming large in the mid-morning sky.  
“Excuse me,” he said once it became clear that the group weren’t moving to let him past  
“Hey, I know you,” said one guy wearing a light grey shirt with a minimalist Wolves logo, as they all continued to block his way, “Aren’t you that kid genius, that was on the news way back?”  
“Ah no,” he said, preparing his usual response, “that’s my cousin, we actually look a lot–”  
“Nice try but I’m really good with faces, Ken isn’t it?”  
“Yeah, Ichijouji right?” chimed in another, this one wearing a dark shirt with a wolf howling at the moon under a well fitted suit jacket, “I used to hate keeping against this guy in soccer, what a bloody show off – he got thirteen goals past me in one game and fucking yawned at the end,”  
“So what are you doing these days, mister better-than-everyone-else?” asked the grey shirt guy again, staring him down with intent.  
“Look, I really need to–” he tried to push though, but they stood firm, a couple of bodies starting to close around on both sides of the footpath.  
“Oh, too good to talk to us, are you? Just like you were too good to keep playing soccer?” interrupted the one in the suit jacket.  
A young woman wearing a leather jacket and a shirt with Yamato’s face on it who looked vaguely familiar snorted, “Too good!? He works at my local tea place – life must’ve taken a fricken nose-dive if these guys are right,”  
“Please, if I could just get through… I’m not in the mood for this kind of conversation, I’m sorry…”  
“Not in the mood?” parroted someone else he couldn’t attribute it to, before the woman piped back up.  
“We are in mourning here,” she grabbed the reproduction of Yamato’s face with both hands and pulled it out towards him to emphasise, “this man was our life, and he was murdered, and we have taken time out from our mourning to talk to you, and you’re not in the mood?! Show some fricken empathy man. Fuck,”  
Just when he thought there was no way he was going to get past, something distracted him.  
A sight so impossible he forgot about the angry mob. He forgot about the hospital and everything he had lost there, and miraculously, a smile appeared upon his face.  
Almost in unison, the mob turned to see what had caught his eye and they too became momentarily amazed at the sight of a pink dragon flying through the mid-morning air.  
By the time any of them thought to check back in on their quarry, Ken had already begun sprinting towards Odaiba, blissfully unaware of the stones being flung towards him as he escaped.

* * *

Jun Motomiya’s fist hovered before the apartment door, as suddenly she began to think that barging in on a woman whose daughter was missing may not be the politest thing to be doing at this hour of the day. Instead of knocking she leant beside the door and lit up a smoke.  
On the one hand, with all of Daisuke’s friends scattered or unwilling to talk, there were no further leads on his murder. However, there was no guarantee that her parents knew anything at all. Her own situation told her that whatever the close-knit group of friends had been into, they had not been too keen on sharing it with family.  
But something told her that the Yagamis were different. Both of their offspring had been a part of that group and they had seemed like much more open and honest children.  
Having just talked herself back into knocking on the door, Jun was about to take another drag of her cigarette and talk herself out of it once again when she finally picked up on the sobbing from inside the apartment.  
“I’m sorry, it’s just that I thought we were past all of this Yuuko, I really did,” came the distraught voice.  
The reply was much more controlled, and lead Jun to believe that it was not the woman whose son and daughter were missing that had been doing the sobbing.  
“Life’s not like that. Nothing ever passes; not fully, anyway. It’s like how it was with Susumu and me. I made him stop his drinking after the Hikarigaoka incident – I mean, being fall down drunk the night your kids go missing during what we all thought at the time was a terrorism event… in hindsight it should have made him stop himself – but he was sober for thirteen years before he did what he did,”  
Jun made a mental note to look into the Hikarigaoka attacks if her forthcoming questioning proved unenlightening.  
“But you and Haruhiko’s relationship proves that it’s not just someone’s nature that will reject a change;” Yuuko continued, “but fate itself. What with you moving from Kyoto to Tokyo to build a family with him, only for Haruhiko to be transferred to Kyoto University while Sora was still at school.”  
“So you’re saying that it’s just fate that’s made her go missing now that Haruhiko’s back?”  
“No, I’m saying this whole deal with the murders… they were naïve to think that things with that world could be over,”  
Jun wondered what she meant by ‘that world’. The world of schoolyard cliques? Some cult? Business with the Yakuza? Somehow, none of those answers seemed to fit.  
“But she was finally over it!” The woman who Jun now realised was Toshiko Takenouchi bawled, the words of her host not calming her one bit, “She was going to make something of herself in the real world. All tour they’ve been referring to her as ‘Sora Takenouchi, Yamato’s fashion designer girlfriend,’ and her brand recognition was skyrocketing. Now who will she be? ‘That girl whose rockstar boyfriend was murdered,’ No name. No occupation. No status. Just somebody who could have been someone, now defined by tragedy…”  
The sobbing from inside got louder as Jun took a final drag of her cigarette. The two women inside definitely knew something she herself did not. There was nothing for it but to go in there and ask, despite the crappy situation they both found themselves in.  
“That wasn’t a great pep talk, was it…” she heard Yuuko say as she crushed the remains of her butt with her boot, resolved to screw politeness, and knocked on the apartment door.  
“I’ll go tell whoever it is to go away,” Yuuko indicated in the middle of her thought, “but you can’t think that about your daughter, she won’t be remembered like that, I know it,”  
Footsteps approached and the door opened to reveal a woman who looked like she could do with a coffee or five.  
“Hi Mrs. Yagami, you probably don’t recognise me, I’m –”  
“You’re Daisuke’s sister aren’t you,” the woman replied, clearly awake enough to see past the rough exterior and the smell of ash in the air and recognise someone even her children had little to do with, “I was sorry to hear about your brother.”  
“Thanks, I’m sorry to hear about your children going missing,”  
“Thanks, but if you know they’re not here… Oh, where are my manners? Please, come in,”  
Jun stepped inside and removed her shoes, and the two of them walked into the living area.  
“Jun, this is Toshiko. Her daughter is missing too,”  
It had all seemed so straightforward outside, but Toshiko’s presence suddenly made Jun nervous. There were things she knew about the Takenouchi household that no sane distant acquaintance should know. Granted, they were a few years out of date, but that did not make her feel any less awkward.  
And how was she going to broach the subject? Oh, hi you two, why were your children friends with my brother and did it have something to do with his death?  
For her part, Yuuko was trying to set her at ease, “How are you coping with everything? Have they found out who…” she trailed off, avoiding any potential trigger words, “or why yet?”  
“I’m dealing with it in my own way,” she replied, as she sat down at the table facing Toshiko, whose form was draped in shadow. Behind her, sunlight leapt off the bright blue of Tokyo bay, and Jun took in its splendour through the Yagami’s expansive windows. There was already a pot of hot tea, and Jun wordlessly accepted Yuuko’s similarly silent offer as she produced a third teacup and poured.  
Thanking her with a nod Jun continued, “And the cops don’t know anything. I even get the feeling like they don’t even know what they don’t know. Like, they know that they need to talk to Sora, Takeru and Jou, but would they even know the right questions to ask once they found them? I feel like there’s something big they don’t know; that I don’t know even; that is stopping us from getting to the truth. Miyako said she and Ken we’re staying out of it, but what is ‘it’?”  
There was a slight pause before Yuuko spoke.  
“Jun, honey, you do know about…?”  
“Oh of course she doesn’t Yuuko, she just said as much,” cut in Toshiko dejectedly.  
Spirits lifted after having her hunch pay off, Jun piped up, “You do know what ‘it’ is, don’t you?”  
Yuuko gave a half-nod as if she was about to speak, but Toshiko spoke up first.  
“Why would you bother telling her? She’ll just forget it again later, you know it as well as I do,”  
“That may be, but there’s no need to be rude about it,” replied Yuuko.  
“You’re right, I’m sorry Jun,” said Toshiko, her melancholy evident as she addressed her for the first time, “Truth be told I envy you. I just want my daughter home safe.”  
Jun was taken aback by the certainty with which Toshiko was sure that she would forget whatever it was that they told her. And what did she mean by ‘forget again’?  
She did not have too long to ponder that question as Toshiko’s wish seemed to have been granted, at least in part.  
For outside the bay facing windows, an inexplicable furry, pink dragon dropped a dark-haired Sora Takenouchi and another similarly unconscious figure right on to the Yagami’s balcony.  
It was at this point, that Jun Motomiya lost her shit.

* * *

The first thing I saw when I dismounted Magnadramon, back at home again, was a bald woman freaking out over the pink dragon at the window and the spiked ball that was very much alive in my arms.  
“Takeru,” I said, “can you deal with Jun for me?”  
“What?” He said as he too stepped off, looking from me to her to the two unconscious bodies Magnadramon had dropped on my balcony, “Why?”  
“I can’t deal with her right now, and you’re the best at explaining things – don’t worry, I’ll catch you up later,”  
He accepted my lie, and I moved on.  
Sora’s mother was here and seeing her daughter slumped on the ground was not doing her state of being any good either. But Jou and Iori had hopped off Magnadramon’s back as well, and they were tending to both mother and daughter’s immediate needs.  
Wallace, Mimi and Alice had also disembarked, the latter having been restored to whatever passed for normality for her before the journey from the Izumi’s began – Magnadramon itself degenerated in a flash of light, reverting to its less conspicuous Champion form.  
My mother was flipping through another magazine, sipping her tea in the kitchen as if I hadn’t just dropped chaos into her living room.  
That was everyone accounted for and dealt with except the mystery man. Or maybe his identity was not such a mystery after all.  
On the journey over I had replayed his fall over and over in my head. And then the last nine days. And then the last two years.  
It was a simple answer. An answer that added context to so many strange absences and coincidences; and opened up a whole other bunch of questions.  
My Gato padded over behind me as I walked over to the guy.  
He was starting to come to. Staggering to his feet, his hair – long luxurious and dark – still obscured his face from me.  
But not for long.  
He pushed his hair behind his ear, and I saw his face.  
Never had I been so outraged to be proven right.  
Seeing the look on my face, he immediately went into de-escalation; like he always did.  
“Hikari wait, I can explain,”  
And suddenly my rage subsided as quickly as it had flared.  
Not because of anything Ichiro had said, but the realisation that there was nothing he could say.  
Whoever it was that I had grown to trust over the past years, he was not in front of me now.  
There was no way I was taking him back.  
“Good,” I said calmly, handing him back his partner, “because _this_ , is going to take a bit of explaining,”  
Takeru had taken Jun into my room to talk, and Jou and Iori were moving a still unconscious and bloodied Sora into my mother’s room – their assurances that Sora had asked to be sedated after coming to and finding she had bitten off the tip of her tongue when she slammed into the wall were not calming Toshiko down at all.  
As they finally got her into the other room and the hubbub lessened a little, Ichiro decided to bite back.  
“And you would know,” he opined, looking pointedly at Gatomon with his good eye as we sat down at the table, “I thought Priory Village was destroyed?”  
“It was, but data is like matter. You can’t destroy it completely,” I replied, wary that Mimi and her blonde entourage were moving toward our conversation and the remaining seats at the table. I wanted to avoid giving them any hope.  
“But you were going first, remember? Let’s start with how none of us knew there was another Japanese chosen child and where exactly you were whenever the fate of the world was at stake,”  
“Oh,” he said, “just that, hey?”  
“You can explain her too if you really want,” I replied only half sarcastically, motioning toward Alice.  
“I can speak for myself,” she said as she sat beside me at the table, along with Wallace who was now tapping away at the laptop in the seat next to Ichiro, and also Mimi who had positioned herself at the head of the table. In typical Mimi fashion, she then proceeded to butt in.  
“But Alice is Wallace’s creation, what would this guy know–” I shot her a look, and she changed her tune, “I mean…,” she turned on Ichiro, all fired up, “Yeah! Who are you Guy? Where were you when shit went down? And what happened to your eye!?” before turning back to me in a whisper, “No really, why are you giving him such a hard time?”  
“We _were_ dating,” I said coolly,   
“That’s fair,” he replied resignedly, “I should’ve come clean after the whole helping out Daisuke thing, but I thought–”  
A sigh.  
“I thought you’d had enough betrayal of trust for one day,”  
I went to speak, but he continued on over the top of me.  
“I get that it’s a shitty excuse, but that’s where I’m leaving it. We can have the knock-down, drag-out later – if we ever get a later that is – anyway, the answer is quite simple really – to how there was another chosen child running around that you didn’t know about. You did know about me – or at least Ken did, and I’ve met you two before as well,” he said to the American residents, eliciting a small gasp from Mimi. Wallace whispered something to her in English but she shooed him away, engrossed in Ichiro’s continuing ramble, “but I understand that a lot of what happened with me was forgotten or you guys weren’t really you guys… I don’t know, I left a little after that and when I got back things had changed – a lot,”  
“What are you on about?”  
“My real name is Ryo Akiyama – maybe I should’ve started with that,”

* * *

Ken was trying not to think about his screaming lungs as he made it over the Rainbow Bridge. The hole in the sky was not any less disconcerting on the other side. In fact, his changed geographical perspective had allowed him to get a firmer grasp of exactly where the rip was centred, and that just happened to be one of the islands in the strait between Odaiba and mainland Tokyo.  
That this was the island Myotismon once terrorised the city from only made the swirling blackness of the rip in reality all the more ominous.  
He had to press on. He had not set eyes on Magnadramon since his initial sighting and every second that passed meant one more in which Hikari could move on, taking secrets of how she brought back her partner with her.  
A shadow passed over him but before he could locate its source, the first stone hit him in the shoulder.  
He looked back and saw that the mob had grown, but that scared him far less than the spectre he saw flying a way behind them, just above the rising sun.  
Adrenalin coursing, he flipped his legs into another gear.  
He needed to get to Hikari and Gatomon asap.  
Daemon was coming.

* * *

Ryo Akiyama was a name I knew only by reputation. Ken had told us about him and some of his exploits, but as I tried to recall what they were there seemed to be something blocking me. I could tell from Mimi’s furrowed brow that she was running up against a similar obstacle. But try as I might, all I could muster was a vague, if begrudging, sense of respect for what he had done  
“But he’s…” I struggled to find a tactful way to say it, “you’re dead,”.  
“Only according to my grave site. The day they marked as my last in this world, I fought off Milleniummon for the second last time, did some time-travel, saved the multiverse and ended up in a different reality,”  
“But what’s a multiverse?” asked Mimi.  
“Huh? Well it’s like there’s this reality – with the human, digital and other worlds that you know – and then there’s other realities, each with their own sets of parallel and overlapping human and digital worlds,”  
“And you saved all of them,” I said almost disbelievingly as I turned something over in my head.  
“Yeah,” he continued, “and then I ended up on a journey in that reality with a bunch of kids”  
“But hang on,” I interjected as I realised what had been bugging me, “You said you saw me in the internet when we took down Armaggedemon – and that was 2003,”  
“Oh, that was when I came back to get my parents,”  
“So you can travel between realities at will?” I questioned, trying to get a handle on exactly how ridiculous a story I was begrudgingly beginning to accept.  
“Not really,” he said, uncomfortable, “That time was a brief window – I got to my new Earth and instantly realised that I needed them with me, so I popped back and grabbed them. Getting distracted by your exploits was just a bonus confidence boost that I was leaving this reality in good hands – only problem was that with all the time-travel and reality-hopping, I’d lost a year and a bit in the process,”  
“So then, how did you get back here?” I asked,  
“Alice,” he replied, “I’d met her briefly on the journey I went on with that reality’s destined heroes. She’d given up her partner…”  
“Dobermon was never supposed to be my partner…” Alice interrupted, as if what she was saying was news to her as well, disregarding our places in the conversation, “I was intangible consciousness, and it was a function given life… there was no destiny or adventure. Dobermon was the one with a purpose… I just got too attached…  
“I wish it hadn’t hurt so much – Dobermon going away… I mean, I could still feel its presence all around me and in you and the others, but still…” Alice looked down at the backs of her hands as she placed her palms on the table, “I shouldn’t have been able to feel anything…”  
Mimi put a consoling arm around her, “Most of us here have lost our partners, Alice, we all know that feeling. You’re not alone,”  
Mimi’s arm seemed to be resting on something solid, but no sooner did she finish her sentence did Alice state “Friendship not required,” in soulless monotone and allowed that arm to pass through her and drop down to Mimi’s side.  
Trying to appear unperturbed, she turned to me and asked the question I’d been trying to avoid about exactly how I got Gatomon back. I told her about my trip to the dream world – omitting the part where not even the world that showed your innermost desires could decide which boy I truly wanted, and the specifics of my trip through the Ocean.  
As I told my highly redacted story, those gathered around to listen grew, as it seemed Jou and Iori had placated Toshiko to a point where they were certain she wasn’t going to call an ambulance and alert the authorities to their location.  
“Jackie reasoned that when Priory Village was destroyed, the data from our partners’ eggs still had to go somewhere. And that somewhere ended up being the world of dreams,”  
I could see a glimmer beginning to surface in Mimi’s eyes. She gripped Wallace’s arm rather forcefully.  
I headed her off.  
“There’s a hole in the sky Mimi. It’s been caused by this girl pulling people between dimensions and as crappy as it is to say this, there was a perfect storm of extraordinary circumstances that got my Gato back, and we should not even be thinking about trying to get the rest of our partners back when travelling there might cause a literal Hell on Earth,”  
My mini-tirade seemed to dampen her hopes, before Alice threw her two Yens worth in, cocking her head to the side in thought, “It should be okay for a few more crossings. Maybe three times before you do irreparable damage? It’s the digital-human gate that’s the real trouble, the door is wide open thanks to you,”  
“Hey!?” exclaimed Mimi, “Then what’s stopping all of Daemon’s forces from pushing through?”  
Alice shrugged, and answered for me, “A door that’s been known to be locked for years, with the key safely stored on the other side, who’s going to test it?” But inwardly I knew I had messed up. The days I had thought I might get back in my own world had now shrunk to hours – if that.  
“Besides,” I continued, as if I was trying to quell my own anxiety over everything, “Daemon doesn’t have any forces any more, all that’s left is the husk that’s controlling my brother,”  
Wallace seemed to snap to attention at Mimi’s mention of Daemon, and after tapping even more vigorously at Sora’s laptop whist I had been speaking, he started explaining something in English to Mimi.  
“What’s up?” I asked.  
“Wallace says he’s figured out how Taichi got like this,”  
He spoke again in English, and Mimi translated for the rest of us,  
“So there was a simulation, or something… he’s talking in computer code and it’s not making much sense… I think, the program Taichi was just working on… he’s traced it back to the last time it was used, and it was nine days ago, just before Daisuke…”  
Ichi-Ryo suddenly started looking very pale, “It’s my fault, isn’t it? That simulation I built to open the gate was a digital simulation of opening a gate to the digital world,”  
Alice seemed to know where he was going, “The same mistake Shibumi made on the day I died,” she said as if Ichi-Ryo knew who she was talking about, and that dying was just another Tuesday, “The digital world is intrinsically linked to all technology, all you’re doing by creating a simulation is just guaranteeing a 502 error for a bad gateway while still connecting to the digital world,” she cocked her head curiously at him, “I thought you knew about this?”  
“No Alice I didn’t,” he said, exasperated, “it might have been good information a couple of weeks back when you were helping me put the program together,”  
“Didn’t I tell you that? About how in my reality, my grandfather went to replenish their coding supplies and left me alone with Shibumi while he was simulating a portal opening to the digital world? No? Well he did, and I guess if you really want to start blaming people, that was where it all started. If my little bunny-rabbit Tsukimi hadn’t gotten loose – if I hadn’t seen that portal and been entranced by the otherworldly glow – if Shibumi hadn’t been so absorbed in his work – if my grandfather the Dolphin had been there to stop me. I never would have jumped through. I wouldn’t have been instantly atomised. I would never have been put back together by the Sovereign. I’d have never met Dobermon. Never seen him give his life for you heroes. Never listened to his scattered data and found my own purpose,  
“But that purpose came with a cost. In that moment I walked away and suddenly, there you were, bottle of whiskey in a colourful bag, a bruise forming on your shoulder from where she punched you and the words ‘Happy 18th birthday, jerkface,’ hanging in the air… the stolen kiss before she left you, and then you saw me… I think… I must have let you stay for so long because I didn’t want you to feel the hurt like I had felt, but then by waiting I was now pulling you away from something much more… intensifying the pain by giving you time to entwine. But you couldn’t say no. You never say no. A pitstop to get your partner and you were back here in this reality, too late and too early at the same time.”  
Takeru emerged from my room with a still shell-shocked Jun trailing behind him and a _‘What have I missed?’_ look on his face. I sent him my best _‘Don’t worry, I’m not sure what she’s talking about either,’_ look and turned my attention back to Alice. She was building to something, I was sure. She just seemed to need to get the rest of the story off her chest first.  
“For my service I was scattered, reduced to my core code and clinging to the internet for dear life. And then Wallace found me, re-purposed me to help people.”  
She looked over at him warmly for a second before continuing on.  
“For a while my fragmented consciousness was content with just that. I helped where I could, even when I wasn’t asked, but often overzealous when I actually was. I helped the brainy one look in on what Ryo and Daisuke were up to, and I helped them build their gate from inside a screen. In the process I gained a little bit of my own knowledge back, though I was still struggling to fit the facts together when I started floating around outside, but each time I met one of you–”  
She looked from Takeru to me and then to Mimi. “–with your heads all aglow with those overwhelmingly powerful halos – sure, you forced me to reboot, but it straightened me out one virtue at a time until I saw the devil in the flesh. It had been cut up like me, trying to pass through the simulated gate that I’d helped build, but it hadn’t reckoned on the gateway not working and it too was obliterated on entry to the human world, clinging to the only thing in the vicinity of a similar type – Wrath corrupting Courage.  
“Just as I grew stronger through taking in your auras, the devil grew stronger by influencing others to act on their urge for revenge. And just as now I’ve pieced together what I need to do to help you beat it, it has found a way to spread it’s influence over the city, and feed the anger of thousands of grieving Tokyoites, and force them to channel that anger at the few people his influence can’t touch,”  
Wallace spoke up again, but all I understood was “Wi-Fi”, a chilling thought came over me seconds before Mimi translated on and confirmed my fears. “He’s piggybacked on the codes Koushiro put in the Wi-Fi to make people forget about Digimon, which means he can –”  
Suddenly the front door burst open, we all turned around to see an exhausted Ken.  
“We need to lock the door!” he spurted, slamming the door closed behind him and leaning against it, “I thought I’d lost them, but I –”  
The door rattled as something tried forcing its way in behind him. Jou grabbed a chair and ran to the door as mother frantically scrabbled at the lock with her key.  
“What’s out there?” Jun asked, frightened.  
“It can’t be Daemon, one fireball and that door’s toast,” said Iori, strangely calm.  
“No,” Ken shook his head, “but he’s coming, and now that this mob is outside, painting a great big target on the apartment, it won’t be long –”  
“So why did you lead them here then?”  
“I told you, I thought I’d lost them, but as I started climbing the stairs, there they were, right behind me, but it was already too late by then, I was already here, so I chose to come and warn you instead, Hikari – you’ve got Magnadramon, I don’t care how – but right now you need to get ready to fight,”  
I looked out the window and saw a shadow floating out between our little slice of Odaiba and the Tokyo skyline. It was staring at me with those sickening neon-blue eyes, no trace of my brother left at all. It was not like last time Daemon was here in the human world, all shrouded and devious, this was the same grinning, ripped monster that lead the battle three years ago.  
This was our worst nightmare, fully formed and eager to repeat those atrocities on another, far more defenceless world.  
I walked toward the sliding glass door and put on what I hoped was a brave face. Ichi-Ryo stood to walk next to me but I shook my head and put my hand on his shoulder.  
“Don’t be stupid,” I said, and lightly pushed him back into his seat, as my Gato ran across the table and jumped up onto my back, “your partner’s in no condition to fight,”  
“But this is why I’m here! Alice brought me back because there was a world-ending threat. I can’t just sit out the final battle and watch you go out there and fight alone,”  
“She won’t be alone,” said Alice, startlingly close to my ear “and you’ve already served your purpose, you bought her time to bring her partner back. Now it’s time for me to fulfil mine, and her to continue fulfilling hers,”  
Alice took my hand with the same warmth I had felt when she passed through me to look into Koushiro’s bedroom, only this time she felt solid, real, and I for just a moment I wondered if she was no longer no-longer human.  
We stepped out onto the balcony; my eyes boring into Daemon’s as he waited for his challenger.  
My Gato’s claws dug into my back, and she apologised briefly.  
Alice turned back to the apartment as the sounds of glass breaking reached our ears. The pressure from her hand began fading and I registered out the corner of my eye that she was shining brightly. Ignoring the cacophony and her dissolution into photons, she said her final goodbyes.  
 _“Wallace, thank you for finding me and putting me back together, none of what you are about to see would be possible if you hadn’t found me,”_ she was speaking English, but in her glow, I understood.  
Daemon must have realised something was up, he readied a fireball and loosed it as her brightness grew, enveloping me to the point where I couldn’t even see the incoming ball of flame.  
I closed my eyes and waited as the warmth spread throughout my body. I felt sensational. I could feel Alice’s presence in every atom of my being.  
But she wasn’t the only presence I could feel.  
The claws had released from my back and the pain from where they had sunk in had vanished, but I could still feel my Gato.  
I opened my eyes.  
Data spooled all around me in a largely featureless pink void.  
Without looking down I knew I was naked, but I wasn’t fazed. I was how nature intended. Besides, there was no one to see except me. No one else to know except my Gato.  
I felt her open her eyes and we could see out again at the fireball closing in on us, just as it had been the moment I first closed my eyes.  
Our instincts kicked in and we raised our shield to deflect the blow.  
We heard an explosion and whipped round in fright, but luckily the deflected blow had impacted a few doors down, blowing a hole in the unoccupied apartment Taichi had been using as a booze den.  
We tuned back to find Daemon almost on us.  
Claws out.  
Grinning gleefully.  
This setting clearly had us at a disadvantage.  
We parried the claw strike with our lance, punched Daemon’s gut with our shield-arm and flew upwards.  
But in close was where he wanted us.  
Claws ripped at our midriff and teeth gnashed at our face.  
We pushed him further upwards, toward the hole in the sky and loosed our lance like a javelin toward him with a bolt of lightning for good measure.  
We flew as fast as our wings would take us, catching up with its temporarily limp form, and tumbled through the hole to Hell with the demon firmly in our grasp.


	39. I Sat By The Ocean

After it was all over, this world was silent save for the gentle crashing of the monochromatic waves as they rolled towards me. I sat and watched, or rather, I let the dim light of this world that reflected off them reach my eyes.  
Despite my transformation, I was back to normal now, and yet I knew nothing would ever be the same. Sure, I was wearing the same clothes, the same shoes, the same face – even my backpack had somehow re-materialised as I disentangled myself from my Gato – but there was no denying that a shift had occurred. Something fundamental.  
“You were amazing out there,” came the whisper of the similarly shell-shocked voice of my brother.  
Almost as an afterthought, he added, “You too Salamon,” but my partner was already out of earshot.  
Our connection as one being had been short, but intense. We needed some space. At least for now.  
Instead of answering I fossicked around in my bag and found the bottle of whiskey intact. I took it out and studied the label. Ryo had been saving it for a special occasion, and I figured that the aftermath of my first battle as the archangel Ophanimon certainly fit that criteria.  
Besides, I did not owe that guy a thing.  
I took a swig.  
Taichi was sitting a couple of metres away, looking like his regular self again. He was staring out as I was at the rolling of the waves, and the figures that stood out in the surf with their backs to the shore. Manifestations of fear so far away. They were human-formed and clearly the same pair of forms repeated in couplings stretching out in an arc around us, but their hidden faces and distance from us obscured their meaning.  
I offered my brother the bottle, stretching my arm out halfway towards him, and he took the booze from me, but didn’t take a sip.  
“What was it like out there for you?” he asked instead.  
I thought for a moment. It was tough to put into words.  
“It was like I was made of air. Like I was no longer made up of atoms and matter, but just pure thought and instinct. And Salamon and I… we weren’t just two beings sharing the same body... _we were_ the _same_.”  
I still did not think I was doing it justice, so I awkwardly asked him if he knew what I meant. Only after the question left my mouth did I realise that he might, but that he might not have had quite the revelatory experience that I had, and the way he avoided my gaze seemed to confirm my fears.  
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”  
Reluctantly, he took a swig of my interdimensional whiskey.  
“Yeah,” he said, a strange half-smile playing on his face, “I guess I used to feel a bit like that with Sora,” he took another swig, and the smile faded, “when we used to make love to Yamato together,”  
“I don’t think that’s quite the same, Taichi,” I replied, blushing as I tried and failed to keep my imagination in check.  
“But it’s that same feeling of acting as one, being of one mind without having to speak, and afterwards not quite being able to explain to anyone just how profound an experience you were having, right?”  
“I guess so,” It was amazing how easy he said it all. It was like it was before he started drinking. Way back before he broke up with them. It was like it was when I still felt like I had a brother.  
“It wasn’t like that with that thing inside me though. I mean, that feeling of one mind one action was there, but it felt _wrong_. I was conscious that my thoughts and my actions weren’t my own, but even my plans to stop that thing from taking over, and the steps I took to get you away from me so I wouldn’t do something… somehow now, I think they were all its plans. My drinking only made my will weaker, but I thought it might … I mean, Digimon can’t handle alcohol, can they?”  
I just stared at him, inwardly repeating Sora’s tired old catchphrase.  
“So that’s what happened,” I said rather resignedly, looking back out at the figures interrupting the dark horizon as I put together the pieces, “I guess, with you how you are, once you got the idea that continuing your drinking would impair Daemon’s ability to take you over, regardless of whether it was your idea or not, the desire to drink would have taken you over, and then your ability to make decisions would have been severely depleted. Just as you thought you were intoxicating your parasite, it was using your plan against you to take greater control,”  
I turned and smiled at him.  
“You would never say those things. This proves it.”  
He just stood up and dusted the sand off his pants, eyes still transfixed by the Ocean.  
“It shouldn’t need to be proved; and the fact that it does… I can’t go back.”  
An idea struck me.  
“What if you didn’t have to?” I asked, but he just shook his head.  
“I know what you’re going to say,” he said, looking back at me, “Daemon had a reason for coming to our world, and it wasn’t just the whole Wrath bit not going over well after all the destruction and conquering of the digital one – but I can’t go with you with him still inside me, no matter how much of him you obliterated earlier,”  
“He’s still with you, huh?”  
It figured. In the moment I had hesitated. Held back so as not to harm my brother. The trade-off was that whilst defeated – the demon held on  
“I can still feel him, and there’s only one thing out there that wants him gone worse than we do,”  
Heart-crushingly, I knew what he meant.  
Dragomon – or the thing that appeared to us in the form of Dragomon.  
The master of this Ocean.  
“But Daemon paid his debt to the devil,” I said, trying to get my facts straight, trying to convince myself that he didn’t need to do this, “he gave up his General to pay for the army,”  
“Or so Daemon thought. This ‘devil’ saw it more as a down payment,”  
“But I don’t want you to go,” It came out more pleading that I intended, but it was true.  
“I’ve got to do what needs to be done; so do you.”  
I could feel the tears coming, but the harder I tried to stop them, it seemed, the quicker they came.  
“When you get back, tell mother something nice from me, okay?”  
He started walking out toward the horizon. The figures, who had been keeping their distance, started closing in in a ring around him.  
A few passed me as I grabbed the bottle for one last swig, and on the one to my immediate right, I saw Sora’s face staring back at me as the deep one wearing it backtracked out to continue its torture of my brother. The face on the one to the left was my own.  
On his way out into the inky black, he didn’t once turn around. But if he had, and he could see beyond the deep ones dogging him, I made sure he would have seen me looking right back at him.


	40. The Adventure

For Takeru, it was the waiting that was the worst. The not knowing.  
One moment she was here and then she was gone in a flash of light. Giant armoured angel in her place. No Hikari. No Gatomon. No Alice.  
The fight raged and then both the demon and the angel were gone too. Up into the hole in the sky.  
The sounds of the mob trying to fight their way into the apartment tried desperately to grab Takeru’s attention, but he just stood there, out on the balcony, eyes locked on the hole in the sky.  
Shouts from both sides blurred into one. The sounds of glass breaking reached his ears as something was thrown through. Sobs from Yuuko. It all meant nothing if the angel failed to make it back through the portal.  
At some point, the cacophony subsided and the mob went home. It was over for them. Their demonic influencer must have been dealt with up there in hell, he reasoned, the fight must be over.  
But Takeru kept staring up at the sky.  
If the fight was over, where was his angel?  
The minutes grew long.  
Eventually, Mimi’s voice broke through his tunnel vision. Wallace wanted to start work on shutting the door to the digital world and closing the hole in the sky.  
Iori and Ryo wanted them both sealed. Mimi and Jou wanted to wait for Hikari to decide. Jun didn’t seem to want to have a say in the matter and Ken didn’t seem to care.  
They wanted his opinion.  
They were looking to him to lead.  
He was not sure he wanted that burden.  
With a sigh of relief, he noted a disturbance in the darkened portal.  
A white glove.  
An arm.  
An angel in an asymmetrical swimsuit, complete with golden breastplate, sight obscuring helmet and over-sized decorative pink ribbon wrapped around her other wrist dove out of the hole in the sky as if in slow motion.  
The ribbon usually floated in place around the angel’s shoulders as if by magic, but now it was taught and trailing the angel in an arc as she re-oriented herself with the gravity of this world. On the other end was a sight that almost moved Takeru to tears.  
Hikari swooped down from the sky and landed her pendulum swing with the smooth grace of one whose descent from the clouds was aided by angels – which, of course, it had been.  
He ached for her to embrace him as she landed. All her petty, prickly acts over the last few years were forgiven. She was here. She was safe. She was saviour of the worlds.  
The moment was perfect.  
But naturally, she ran to embrace her mother.  
Her brother was gone.  
Reality crept back in. His brother, Koushiro and Daisuke were all still dead. There was still a portal to hell, wide open in the sky. The door to the overrun digital world was still open.  
“It’s not over, is it?” he muttered; half to himself and half to the eight-foot tall vision of angelic beauty that had just drifted down beside him.  
“No, not in the slightest,” replied Hikari’s partner.  
He stepped inside, and beckoned Angewomon in.  
“You don’t have to wait outside. Power down and relax for a while.”  
She shook her head, “We can’t stay long,”  
“She’s right,” agreed Hikari, “We’re only here to say goodbye, and to make sure you guys close the doors after us.”  
Protestations popped up from all corners, but Hikari wasn’t having any of it.  
“You guys haven’t seen what it’s like over there. Lillithmon and Barbamon have–”  
“Who?” interrupted Iori, oblivious as ever to the flow of conversation.  
“You remember when we fought Daemon the first time, he had the three Generals, right?”  
Iori nodded “And even though we defeated them back then… three years ago they were somehow back… marshalling Daemon’s troops… killing innocent Digimon…”  
“They’re the reason this all started. After the battle, the three Generals all evolved into Demon Lords in their own right. Daemon then sacrificed MarineDevimon’s evolution Leviamon, the Lord of Envy, to the Ocean as payment for the army of Deep Ones. This caused LadyDevimon and SkullSatamon’s evolutions to turn on Daemon. They locked him up and took control, and by the time he eventually escaped, the only place left to run to was our world.”  
“How, do you know all this?” asked Takeru.  
“Jackie told me as he led me to the gate to get back here,”  
“And who is Jackie again?” asked Ichiro, the plain-sight answer to where Ryo Akiyama had been hiding.  
“One of Gennai’s copies, the one who went to India with Koushiro and I. He and Eucalyptus are the only ones left – look the longer I stay here, the longer that hole in the sky needs to stay open. Once I’m gone, we can close it, and the gate to the digital world for good,”  
It was a lot for Takeru to take in.  
“But how will you get back?” he asked, not picking up the subtext for a second.  
Hikari looked at him and smiled a wan smile.  
“I’m not coming back. Don’t you see? Every three years the balance between the worlds gets sent towards evil. Every three years we come in and restore order, and every three years we say our tearful goodbyes because we have lives in this world that need to be lived. As human beings, and children at that, we needed the intervening time to grow and experience normality outside of our destiny. But that time we took for ourselves only let evil back in. And no matter how hard we have worked to be normal, we never were, because we were Chosen. We were special. We actually had the power to do good in the worlds and we just ignored it. _I_ ignored it. Me! The one whose connection to our destiny was so strong I actually had it spoken through me!  
“It’s time someone went over and stayed to keep the balance. And it has to be me.”  
She spoke all of this directly at Takeru. Looking deep into his eyes. Hoping for understanding.  
It was as if he was once again that naïve teenager who would write a whole novel about their shared experiences, just to show her how much he loved her.  
Before he knew it, before he could even think about what following through on his words would entail, he had blurted out, “I’ll come with you,”  
The moment would have been perfect were it not for the chorus of other voices around the room offering exactly the same thing.  
He saw her look around at all the determined faces, her smile tinged with sadness.  
“I can’t let any of you do that, you all have lives that you’ve built here that are too precious to give up. Jou, you’ve finally qualified to be a doctor. Ken, you’ve got your future kids and Miyako to think about. And Mimi, you’re living in America for heaven’s sake – the land of the free – you’ve earned the right to enjoy that. Iori, you–”  
“I actually didn’t offer my services,”  
“Because you’re young and you’ve got so much more to experience here in this world, getting a job, finding a steady boyfriend… and before you say anything Ichi–,” she paused, “Sorry, Ryo, I need you to stay here and help Wallace close the gate to the digital world and fix the hole in the sky once I’ve gone back through it,”  
He was about to protest but she held up a hand to silence him.  
“I also need you and–,” she moved to address the horned purple ball in Ryo’s arms, “you’re a Hopmon, right?”  
The ball nodded, impressed.  
“You and Hopmon need to protect this world if something gets through, or if I fail…” she trailed off and Takeru seized his chance.  
“And what about me Hikari? My brother is gone, my job is worthless – just telling truth so fantastic it can pass as fiction – it’s like I sell a piece of my soul every time I tap my keyboard. My parents and I don’t see eye to eye and I honestly don’t see my brother’s death changing that. Hikari, if I don’t go with you, I don’t know what I’ll do,”  
He looked away, but he could hear her approaching. Felt her hand grasp his.  
“I know how you feel, but you have to stay here. Because you’ve got the most important task of all. You need to give the world a plausible explanation for all of this. Those people out there are hurting over your brother’s death. Maybe not as much as you, but enough that they were susceptible to the influence of an extradimensional demon – they need an answer so that they can move on. As do the Izumis and the Motomiyas – present company excluded. You need to come up with a lie so believable that even the police buy it. And on top of all of that, the explanation needs to keep my brother and Sora out of it.”  
“That’s some task…”  
“You are right, it will have to be the one of the greatest stories ever conceived and it’ll take one hell of an author to write it. You – only you; Takeru Takaishi – can do this,”  
Tears welled in his eyes and it was all he could do not to let them escape.  
“Now,” she said, changing her tone to one of finality, “I need to say goodbye to Sora, and then we’ve got to go, before any of this portal to hell stuff gets any worse,”

Once Hikari was in the other room, Mimi began hurriedly talking to Wallace in English.  
Takeru had not really kept up his English after senior-high, but he assumed it was a quick rundown of what Hikari had just said. The words ‘ _close_ ’ and ‘ _door_ ’ featured prominently but her perspective seemed to be out of whack – he kept hearing what he was sure were first person collective pronouns being thrown around, and it sounded like she was the one saying goodbye and not Hikari – but maybe that was just because he was so out of practice.  
Takeru looked over at Ryo. The mystery man who had been hiding in plain sight.  
“Are you going to listen to her, Ryo?”  
“Of course,”  
“But you love her, don’t you?”  
“It’s hard not to,” he paused, “but I don’t need to tell you that,”  
“And you’re just going to let her go? Just like that?”  
The boyfriend formerly known as Ichiro took a second to gather his thoughts.  
“It’s the right play. Limited resources and two discrete locations to defend and attack. Send the heavy hitter to do the attacking and let the lesser light defend the home turf if needed,”  
“But you love her, shouldn’t that transcend what’s logical?”  
“I– I’ve lied to her since the day we met, it doesn’t matter how I feel. But you…” he started but did not seem to be able to continue the argument.  
Jou walked over and put an arm around his shoulders.  
“Takeru, I understand what you’re trying to get him to say, and I can’t bear to see her go into all this alone either–”A cough from the balcony interrupted him, “– newly re-formed deities excluded, of course – but do you really think that if you insisted on going with her, after she made that big speech and everything, that she wouldn’t resent you for it?”  
Takeru had to concede his lot. Now that Jou had said it out loud, he could no longer deny to himself that he and Hikari’s futures lay in separate worlds.  
“And besides that, writer-boy,” Ryo piled on, finally articulating his previous thought, “do you think taking anyone you are even remotely attracted to into battle against a Demon Lord of Lust is a good idea?” he shook his head in answer to his own question, “That story might be fun for a while, but it’s definitely ending badly,”  
Hikari appeared back in the room, and Jou immediately asked her how Sora was doing.  
Hikari replied that she was sleeping.  
“Her mother said she came to, saw that she was there for her and then fell back asleep; I didn’t wake her because she needs the rest, but I said my goodbyes,”  
 _This is the moment_ , thought Takeru, _she is about to step out the door and out of our lives forever_.  
“Miyako left me,”  
Everyone turned to look at Ken.  
“Her routine test went bad, emergency C-section, I think… she said she lost them… lost them both, and then she… she couldn’t stand the sight of me,” he looked Hikari dead in the eye, “so when I say ‘I’m coming with you’ again in a couple of minutes time… please, just let me,”  
Yuuko immediately embraced him, Iori wondered aloud at what ‘them both’ meant, and Takeru tried to console him.  
“Give it a couple of days Ken, she’ll need you to get through this, she’ll come around. You just need to be patient,”  
“She’ll be fine,” said Ken, still staring at Hikari intensely, “she’s got three siblings, and two parents who would do anything for her. She has something to get her through this, and it doesn’t involve me. And I… I need something else, making tea for random people isn’t going to cut it. So, Hikari, I’m coming with you,”  
Hikari turned to her partner. Angewomon gave a slight nod.  
“And I’m coming too,”  
“Mimi, no… what about America?”  
“Do you know what is waiting for me back there? Another long line of meaningless one-night stands that start out with me drinking alcohol to try to forget about what happened the night before, and end with me drinking even more to numb myself to the depraved shit I’m agreeing to do for some weirdo whose Asian fetish is the least of my worries. No matter how I approach things the outcome never changes. I’m just an exotic sex-doll to them, and that’s not a life. The only time I ever felt like I had a purpose was when I was with Palmon,”  
“Mimi, I told you before–”  
“I’m not saying I want to go because I want to try to get Palmon back. I want to go so I can actually do something useful. I want that direction back in my life, Hikari. Please let me try to get it,”  
“Mimi, if the guys do their job, we may never be able to come back. You get that right?”  
Her eyes fluttered in the direction of Wallace, before she replied with a sigh, “All that’s here for me is more of the same,”  
“Well then,” Hikari said, clearly keen to change the subject, “ready for an adventure?”

And so it was, the three of them said their goodbyes, Angewomon made a couple of loops in her magic sash, and then, in a moment that seemed to be upon them much too soon, the four figures ascended away from the human world for good.  
Takeru never took his eyes off Hikari as she rose, committing every second of her journey back into the skyward Hell to memory, but she never looked back.  
As he watched, he felt strangely calm.  
She and her partner had saved their world single-handedly.  
She had become in flesh the angel he had always known her to be.  
If anyone could restore the digital world it was Hikari Yagami.  
Once the final atom of their angelic kite passed through the void, he heard himself ask aloud if they even knew how to close it.  
Ryo just shrugged and then translated the question for Wallace who mirrored the response.  
“At least,” the secret tamer continued, “not without Alice,”  
Takeru looked back to the heavens and saw, with a pleasant sense of comprehension, that the portal was closing on its own.  
The dark mass shrunk down to a point over the space of a minute. A return to order. A closing. An end.  
Just as Takeru was about to look away – satisfied in the very least that his world was safe – he noticed a crack of darkness arc out to the north-east over Tokyo and well out over the Pacific.  
It was only a flash, like some sort of negative lightning bolt, but it filled him with a sense of dread.  
He waited with bated breath.  
One minute passed.  
Nothing.  
Another minute passed and then a message pinged on his phone.  
Then Jou got one.  
A muffled sound from the adjoining room meant at least one of the Takenouchis had received a message as well.  
Then Iori, Yuuko, Ichiro and Jun all got one almost instantaneously.  
They all looked at their phones.  
Chaos ensued.


	41. Epilogue: Losing A Whole Year

Takeru sat at his computer in his apartment in Osaka, typing furiously. It was almost finished, the final words in his year-long cathartic odyssey were just moments away, and whole hours ahead of his generously extended deadline as well!  
 _‘And then I watched as she turned away from me and flew off in the arms of her angelic partner. There was a flash of light as they passed through the gateway and she was gone from me forever.’_  
The final sentence was there, he could send it on to Satomi now if he wanted, but since there was no way she would agree to produce it, he decided to read through it one last time to make sure it was perfect.  
He had agonised over the chapters with Hikari the most while writing it, but reading them back now, there was no doubt in his mind that the thoughts he had written for her were the ones she herself had had. It was the only way he could make sense of her actions, and it pained him to know that if he had realised how she had been feeling at those crucial moments, she might not have felt compelled to go down that path at the end.  
In his darker moments, he wondered whether it would have made a difference if, instead of trying to convince her to let him go with her to save the digital world, he had tried to convince her to stay in the human world with him and leave the digital world in chaos.  
But even in his wildest dreams, she would never have agreed. And if she had, well, he would not love her quite as much.  
Anyway, it was all over now and finally he felt like he was ready to at least try to move on. Jou and Iori had, but their jobs and study were more conducive to the healing process, and neither of them had lost quite as much as he had. The only major change in Iori’s life was that now, instead of doing his law degree with the aim of becoming a lawyer, he was setting himself up to go to the police academy after he graduated. He was going to become a detective, not only to follow the dreams of his late father, but to ensure that the policework was done right, and killers such as Taichi would not be let out on technicalities – regardless of whether they are possessed by evil demons or not.  
Jou was living his dream of helping people and making sure every one of his patients left him healthier than when they met. Even though he was not a surgeon, he was still saving lives in his own way, always urging people to not only consider their own feelings when undergoing treatment, but their loved ones as well.  
The task Takeru himself had been left by his departing angel had turned out to be much easier than she had made it out to be. A lot of people made up their own explanations after the offshore earthquake. Gas leaks causing mass hallucinations was a popular theory for why a demon was fighting a pairing of a pink dragon and a purple Power Ranger, and later an armour-clad arch-angel; especially with all of the fuss over the nuclear spill up the coast. The murders of Koushiro and Daisuke were forgotten in the aftermath, with only Yamato’s still in the public consciousness. With the thousands lost all along the eastern shores in the quake and ensuing tsunami, it was simple to say that Hikari, Ken and Taichi were among their number. The damage to Tokyo itself may have been minimal in relative terms, but it had been enough to make the detectives believe that the man who had apparently killed Yamato in a jealous rage could have perished without a trace.  
As Takeru’s day job proved, the most believable lies were the ones closest to the truth.  
And this one did not even need to be told. The police concocted the story without much fanfare, keen to avoid inviting suggestions of negligence in regards to their release of Taichi just hours prior to Yamato’s death. In the process, they were more than happy to close the book on all three cases.  
It was a story that both Takeru’s parents respective companies parroted expertly, dressing it up so devoid of any juiciness that the public just accepted it and moved on.  
As for Hikari’s wish that her brother was kept out of it, everything had been tied up so neatly already, that any insistence by Takeru to the contrary would have raised more suspicion than anyone would have wanted.  
Only the families were told the true story, and the burden of convincing those not at the Yagami’s when it had all come to a head had fallen to him. Telling two people that the son they themselves could have never had on their own, the son they had only received through deep tragedy, had been stabbed in the back by a demon masquerading as his closest friend, was surprisingly easier than what he had had to reveal to Ken’s parents. Not only did he have to break the news that Ken had gone on to the digital world, but that they had lost their potential grandchildren as well. It was one thing to outlive one son, and quite another to outlive both and know that the sliver of hope their line would progress had been snuffed as well.  
They had tried to contact the Inoues for some mutual grieving, but even that was not possible. Their shop had been damaged in the earthquake and they had sold it all – the shop, and the few apartments they owned above it – even before Takeru could tell Miyako what had happened to everyone, let alone the Ichijouji family’s attempts at finding closure.  
No one had seen or heard from Miyako since.  
At least Sora had had the decency to tell everyone she was closing the door on them. Takeru understood that she would not want to see him since he knew he would remind her of his brother, and she had never had much to do with Iori anyway. He had been sure she would keep in touch with Jou, at least, but even he got the same message that she was blocking their numbers and moving on.  
She had been easier to keep track of than Miyako though, and this was simply because the press and the public had picked up a morbid obsession with her after Yamato’s death. Her clothing line had received a huge bump in sales, and she had expanded her range and refined her styles. Now she catered not only for teenage to mid-twenties women, but the older demographics as well. She had even started marketing some of her more boyish designs to men and even that risk had paid off.  
The fact that she had become somewhat of a recluse over the past year had only added to the mystique around her brand. The image of this poor woman who had once been so sought after that her ex-lover had killed her rock-star boyfriend over her and was now holed up somewhere, alone and heartbroken, designing her trendy outfits as a way to deal with her pain, was not one Takeru thought Sora would have ever purposely wanted to promote.  
But that was before Yamato died, and before Hello Birdy made it big.  
He longed to talk to Hikari about his concerns over Sora’s wellbeing, to just see her face and hear her voice tell him that he was worrying too much. He wanted her to hold him and tell him how she loved how concerned he was over nothing, and how he would make someone very happy one day.  
His daydreaming was interrupted by the ping of a message on his phone and he sighed, resigned to his lot.  
But his mood changed when he saw the text’s author. He felt his heart in his throat as he opened the text, the possibilities of what lay inside too stimulating to ignore.  
 _I’m back. I’ve got something for you…_  
His phone pinged again and a photo appeared below the text.  
If he was not already completely thrilled by the first message, the second certainly got him there.  
He quickly sent off his story to Satomi, not giving a crap about the consequences, and hurried downstairs to his car. As he went he made sure to save the image of the girl with the brown side-bangs and hair-clipped fringe for posterity. Not simply because of who she was and the adorably demure button-up collared blouse she was wearing, but because of the need in her eyes and the breast clutched tantalisingly in her hand.

* * *

When he arrived at the apartment he could scarcely contain his eagerness. It was as if ten thousand head of cattle were jostling against the inside of his chest cavity, sensing that in a few moments it would be opening and they were preparing themselves for stampede ahead.  
He felt them rail against the gates as his eyes caught sight of her sitting on the corner of the bed. Her skirt tight around her thighs. Her knees together and pointing away on an angle. She was bathed in golden rays beaming down from the window at her back that bounced off her just so, surrounding her in a brilliantly bright, almost otherworldly glow.  
She looked at him nervously from the shadows inside her perfect halo, waiting for him to make the first move  
“What are you doing here?” he heard himself ask, not able to think consciously in her presence after so long.  
“I’ve beaten the remaining Demon Lords and rebuilt the digital world… where else was I going to go?”  
She half-smiled, and he felt more than just the cattle grow restless. Removing his coat and hanging it up next to the trench coat on the rack in the entranceway, he began to approach her. For the moment, he feigned confusion.  
“But what about the barriers between the worlds? Aren’t you worried about the two worlds colliding?”  
“I need you Takeru,” she replied without a hint of reservation, as he reached her on the bed, “I feel it the same as I feel the urge to breathe, and once that urge possessed me I knew I would risk anything to see you again,” she reached out brushed his cheek with her knuckles, “to touch you again,” she continued as her hand travelled down towards his crotch, “to feel the true extent of you for the first time…” She smiled at what she found.  
There was no use in him trying to deny his desire now. As she undid his trousers he slipped a hand down her skirt and found her willingness equal to his own.  
“My, my, Hikari,” he began in a low murmur, as he lowered her delicately on the bed, “it seems you did not defeat the Lord of Lust quite as completely as you had hoped,”  
“No, I didn’t,” she replied with one eyebrow raised, “You could even say that part of her is inside me right now,” She hoicked up her skirt and opened her legs so that he stood between them, then reached up to grab his shirt neck and pulled him closer so he could hear her moan, “But I’d prefer it if part of _you_ was inside me right now instead,”  
He stuck his tongue in her mouth for a moment before stepping back to kick away the trousers that had fallen down around his ankles and for a moment he just stood there, naked from the waist down, looking down at her figure. He wondered what he had done to deserve someone who looked like she did, with legs so toned and smooth, bust so ample the buttons on her brightly coloured blouse were straining with the effort of keeping them contained and her hair so perfectly arranged…  
“Please Takeru?” she asked timidly, as if worried she had upset him in some way.  
It was all too much for him. She was too pure. Immaculate.  
Before he even knew it himself, he was inside her.  
Gentle. Tentative. Thoughtful.  
He could be what she wanted too when the moment called for it.  
She pinched shut her eyes and tucked her elbows to her sides at the sensation. She held her cocked wrists just above her shoulders, nervously pulling in her forearms in time with his measured thrusts, unintentionally squishing her imprisoned breasts together enticingly in the process.  
Sooner than he expected she began grinding her hips desirously against him.  
He found his pace quickening, and he leant over her, his arms steadying him on the bed either side of her head, his gaze now locked on her panting face.  
She made eye contact and held it with animal intensity, matching his pace with her own hips as he came down on her faster still.  
He could see the ecstasy on her face as she reached up her hand and caressed his cheek once more.  
“My–” she exhaled between thrusts, “my _mountain_ –”  
He leant down and kissed her long and hard.  
She gently pushed him away and breathed, heavy. Fixing him with her stare once again.  
“My…” He put a finger to her lips to quiet her but she was somewhere else. “My Ya–”  
Suddenly his hands were at her throat and he was pressing down.  
She gasped for breath and arched her back violently. The buttons on her blouse burst as her breasts exploded out into the open, their magnificence relaxing his hold on her throat.  
“No,” she breathed, pulling his hands back to her neck, and pressing, “keep…”  
He pressed back down in anger if only to shut her up once more.  
He tried to concentrate on the visage of frenzied desire on her face and the rhythmic jerking of her chest. He was close. If he could just hold on a little longer…  
She raised her head off the bed to increase the pressure on her windpipe and focus her own penetrating stare back on his face, and began mouthing the word Takeru dreaded once again.  
He turned his head away but even then; his eyes found the cigarettes on the bedside table.  
 _Hikari would never…_  
He turned back to her only to find that her hair was no longer attached to her head and her ever-reddening teary-eyed face was still mouthing that word.  
 _It was not supposed to go like this… This was supposed to be my moment…_  
He thrust one final time as deep and hard inside of her as he could and tried to fake an involuntary howl. He pulled out swiftly so she had no chance to feel him soften, and knelt before her – finishing her off orally and digitally while she moaned his dead brother’s name into the sticky mid-afternoon air.

* * *

Takeru sat on the edge of the bed admiring the quality of the wig in his hands. She really had outdone herself. The follicles moved with the ease of real hair and the cut, colour and styling was indistinguishable from Hikari’s own. Had he not felt the artificiality of it with his own hands he might have even believed it had been procured from her very head.  
Jun emerged from the bathroom with her towel wrapped around her and sat on the bed beside him, snatching up the wig and covering up her shaven head as she did so.  
“It’s really good isn’t it?” she said proudly, pulling a few half-hearted faces in the process. Seeing her like that in just a towel made Takeru think back to almost exactly a year previous when the real Hikari had emerged from her shower similarly covered from breast to thigh, with her hair jutting out at all awkward angles. At the time her hair had reminded him of Jun’s existence for the first time in years. Until then Daisuke’s sister had just not been a part of his conscious thoughts, but suddenly, he had begun wondering how she was taking the loss of her brother. He had had no way of knowing that he too would soon be in the same situation or where their fates would eventually lead. “I spent hours in the wig shop picking out the one with the right shade and proper part, and then I took it to a hairdresser with some pictures of how she styled it, and you’ll never believe–”  
“Your text said you had something for me?” he interrupted, feeling he was owed a little selfishness.  
“Oh,” she said, offence visible on her face for just a moment as she removed the wig, “I do, but you could ask a little nicer, couldn’t you?”  
“How was your trip to Tokyo?” he asked, making sure to use the intimate form of ‘you’ this time, “Did you find anything interesting?”  
“A couple of things…” she said teasingly, as she went over and retrieved her phone from the pocket of her trench-coat. “Where do I start…?”  
“With how the ’Wolves paid off their cancelled tour debts…?” he suggested, trying to keep her on track.  
“Typical Ishida-Takaishi,” she said in a pantomime huff, sitting back down next to him, “always more concerned with _her_ interests than mine…”  
“So I was right; you found proof that it was her?”  
“Yeah, but even better, I’ve got the only photo of her taken in the last twelve months,”  
She passed the phone over to him.  
His first thought was that it could not have been Sora Takenouchi in the picture, but the longer he looked the easier it was to see past the much longer, stark white hair and the strange business jacket which faded from navy to maroon partway down its length, and recognise the face of the girl he had known. She had adorned herself with garish gold-framed rose-tinted sunglasses, a matching necklace and several tacky rings on her black-nailed fingers, but despite all that there was now no doubt in Takeru’s mind that this was Sora. He just was not so sure how to take it.  
Jun had begun filling him in on the details of how she had managed to trace the money and get a face to face with the now famous recluse but Takeru was not listening all that intently. He had thought that Sora would be the only person with enough money to bail the Teenage Wolves out of their debt, but he had assumed her motives would have simply been to keep them together so that Yamato’s music would live on. But now he began to wonder why she had not gone public with it. An announcement like that, that the ex-girlfriend of the dead lead singer was supporting their return to the scene would be huge for both brands’ publicity. Maybe she wanted to do it under the radar so that people did not just think it was a publicity stunt or that she was somehow profiting from Yamato’s death.  
He could feel his mind beginning to spiral once more down the rabbit hole of suspicion and paranoia. He tried to focus on what Jun was saying, to pull out of his train of thought. She seemed to be saying something about how she had bought a wig to disguise herself when she went to spy on Sora and how that had then given her the idea to dress up like Hikari.  
“Oh and that reminds me of what I was going to say earlier. As I was leaving the hairdresser’s I walked through Shiba Park to get to the station and I bumped into a friend from senior high–”  
She was interrupted by the sounds of a nonsensical French pop-song blaring out of Takeru’s pocket. He groaned and handed her back her phone whilst taking out his own.  
“Can you send that to me while I’m taking this?” he asked Jun, knowing she knew he had to take the call, before answering it with the traditional greeting, just like he always did.  
“Hi Takeru, it’s Satomi here…”  
“I know,” he checked his watch as he stepped outside, “You read that quick,”  
“Oh, I’m not quite finished yet, I’ve only really gone through the prequel movie that you set in 2005 and look… I really liked it. I thought the villain was really well fleshed out. This girl whose mother died from that vampire from season one, now living an idyllic but lonely life jet-setting around Japan with her high-flying, yet emotionally absent father, tries to resurrect the thing that killed her mother and bend it to her will, along with any other digital monsters that get in her way – I really felt like I connected with her, you know?”  
“Uh, yeah?”  
“But why…? Did you really have to make her jump off the building at the end, with Ken just inches away from grasping her hand and saving her?”  
 _‘Well yes,’_ he thought, _‘that’s how it happened…’_  
“It represents a tonal shift for the show,” he said, “The time jump from there to the series was another six years, and these kids… they aren’t kids anymore and they are dealing with much heavier issues – in particular the idea that they can’t save everyone and that even heroes aren’t safe from death… Character-wise for Meiko, she’s obsessed with this back and white idea that the digimon are the cause of all the trouble that has gone on, and she views the kids with partners as abominations, when her plan fails to even rid the world of the chosen ones, she no longer wants to live in a world where digimon and humans work together because it conflicts with that narrative she’s been telling herself for six years, that the bad monsters killed her mother and they need to pay – I’m not changing it,”  
There was silence on the other end of the line.  
“Satomi?” he prompted.  
“I get that last year a lot of things happened to your friends and family… friends and family that I know you have based the characters in this story on… but you know that I can’t produce a show like the one that you are describing and… it’s gotten to the stage where I feel like you’re doing this deliberately…”  
“Doing what?”  
“Tanking the show! First you pitch this ridiculous notion of a reboot with different characters – which was a definite non-starter – and then, when we give you the extra time to work out a plot and all your extra baggage that you’re carrying around… Then you turn in this! It’s not even storyboarded like I asked!”  
“That’s not the way I…” But it was no use, the impulsive young woman who could not help but put him on a pedestal in the middle of the cold and featureless room of her heart, was audibly piercing through the professional veneer she had built over the last year.  
“And then you write this character, this Meiko Mochizuki, who you basically describe as looking exactly like me, who goes through some awful, awful shit and you refuse to even consider redeeming her!”  
Personally, Takeru thought the Second Kaiser had looked more like Miyako, but telling Satomi that was not an option, and in this state nothing was changing her mind.  
“Look, if you are going to complain about how you’re portrayed in my writing, you should at least have the courtesy to read the parts you’re in first,”  
There was silence on the end of the line for a moment before the middle manager version came back on the line. Calm. Professional. Intrigued.  
“Fine, I’ll read the rest of what you sent. But just so you know, from what you’ve said so far, it’s likely that we’re going to implement Plan-B,”  
“Plan-B?” repeated Takeru.  
“It’s more of a Plan-A-Point-Five,”  
“That doesn’t make sense,”  
“Neither does throwing out your target audience with the unsullied bathwater.”  
And with that, she hung up.

Back inside, Jun was dressed and watching the news. A young woman – Takeru guessed she was around Jun’s age – was in some distress.  
“This is what I was trying to tell you,” Jun said excitedly, pointing at the screen, “After I got the wig styled, I ran into a friend of mine in Shiba park and I hung out with her and her little nephews – they’re adorable, almost a year old – Oh yeah! You know, Miyako’s kids? – and we were walking past the school when I saw the hairdresser,” she gestured at the screen again, even though by now the image had changed, and Takeru was too distracted to look, “running through the park towards the school. Frantic. And as she passed I asked what was wrong and she said, her son had gone missing from the school on the other side of the park? Like, what are the chances of that happening?”  
“Wait, what do you mean by ‘Miyako’s kids’?”

* * *

* * *

_Earlier that day._

Little Toru Higashino was running.  
He just wanted to get away.  
The kids at school were stupid, because they thought he was stupid for believing in aliens and never letting go of his Astro Boy.  
They didn’t understand. His Astro Boy was special.  
Last year he had convinced his Mama to buy him a Devilman action figure when he saw it in the toy store. Devilman didn’t look a lot like Winged Alien-Man, but it looked more like him than Astro Boy with hair combs tied to his back. Now that he had a stand in for Winged Alien-Man, he could make Astro Boy look more like Super Astronaut Man.  
He made the tinfoil hat and the red cape that was really more like a scarf, and stole a permanent purple marker to colour him in.  
When Toru was done his Astro Boy was the coolest thing he had ever seen.  
The kids at school didn’t like his Astro Boy. They thought it was stupid.  
Today he had been trying to get someone else to play the fight scene with him, but no-one had wanted to. They had teased him instead.  
“They’re real. I saw them,” he had said to try to make them stop, but it just made them tease him more, so he ran away, and that’s what he was doing now.  
He was on a mission. Get to Mama.  
First step. Run past the library and across the street to the car park.  
Easy.  
Next, go over another street and towards the park with the temples and the forest.  
Toru knew his Mama worked on the other side of the forest part of the park, so all he had to do was get to the other side, and she could look after him there. Like she did before she made him start going to boring school.  
The problem was that there were three temples and they always confused him.  
But despite what the kids at school said, Toru was not stupid, Toru was smart.  
He knew he needed to make sure Tokyo Tower was on his right before he went into the little forest. There were no thoughts of calling it Space Explorer Two today. This was a secret spy mission. No astronauts or aliens today.  
But as soon as he made it to the forest part of the park, he lost sight of the Tower and the windy paths started to confuse him. The trees were also very pretty and every now and then he would find himself stopping and looking at the blossoms that were just coming out.  
As he made it further in, he noticed that some of the trees had funny purple leaves. A bit further in and the trees started to get a bit scary, grey and arching over him like bony hands.  
He knew what to do. Put Tokyo Tower on the right and keep going straight. Then he would find the road.  
But where was the tower?  
The trees were thin enough to see through, but wherever he looked, all he saw was sky.  
 _Be smart Toru. Prove those kids from school wrong._  
He turned back the way he had come in, but he could not see the trees with the funny purple leaves now either. It was just scary bone trees.  
It was quiet too. He could not hear any cars or the bustle of daytime Tokyo either.  
Something was wrong.  
“Mama…” he called out, nervously.  
He clutched Astro Boy in his hands. He had to be brave.  
There was a rustle of leaves and the sound of a snapping twig behind him.  
He looked and saw some sort of Armoured Bug Man walking towards him, looking mean and very not nice.  
Toru bolted in the other direction.  
Running away was a type of brave.  
He looked behind him, but he could not make out where the Armoured Bug Man was, and then–  
He ran into something soft and fell to the ground.  
The something soft said “Oh,” and Toru looked up at it.  
It looked like a girl. The type of girl Mama would not let into her hair salon.  
She had a small white shirt that did not cover her tummy and a raggedy black leather skirt with a black leather belt. She was also wearing a big red jacket on her shoulders, and a black crown on her head which looked a bit like a flower.  
“Hey,” she said sweetly, with a light-up smile, “What’s your name?”  
Toru had thought a second ago that she was wearing sunglasses, but now he saw that the big black shiny things on her face were actually her eyes. What he had thought was her hair was actually vines, and what he had taken to be purple lining of her jacket were actually like wings from a flying ant but bigger.  
“No? Maybe if I try…” she continued talking but Toru didn’t understand. It was like she was talking in an alien language. Maybe he was on another planet.  
Flower Punk Girl crouched down as far as she could so that her head was only just above him, studying him like he was the alien.  
“Hmm, I guess you could be Chinese or Korean, but I can’t speak… and you do look Japanese…? Maybe you’re just not a talker, huh?” the Flower Punk Girl said, “It must be a bit scary for you, being here on your own, talking to a funny looking girl like me…” she looked around and asked a question more to herself than at him, “How did you get here anyway?”  
For an alien she sure knew a lot about Earth.  
“Oh, I know!” she said with a start, “Do you like yo-yos?”  
She stood back up and pulled a spiky green biscuit-looking thing out of thin air. It did look a lot like a yo-yo, but instead of a string it had a vine wrapped around it – kind of like the stuff growing out the back of her head.  
She spun it a couple of times in front of his face and his eyes followed it up and down.  
“Now,” she said, getting into position like a baseball pitcher, “watch this,”  
She aimed at a nearby tree and let fly with the yo-yo at incredible speed, hitting the tree with a crash and then pulling the disc part straight back into her hand with a tiny flick of the wrist. By the time the yo-yo was back, the top half of the tree had slid down on an angle and fallen onto the ground.  
Flower Punk Girl struck a pose. “Pretty cool, huh?”  
He smiled and nodded. She was pretty cool.  
“So you do know Japanese!” she exclaimed, but before Toru could say anything, he heard an annoyed voice from behind him.  
“I’ve checked my half of the sector and can’t find any trace of the anomaly…”  
Toru spun around and saw the Armoured Bug Man standing right over him. From this angle he was all creepy insect legs, ballooning black trousers and lots of spiky drill things.  
A second later, Toru was hiding behind Flower Punk Girl, arms wrapped around a leg and one side of his face buried in the outside of her thigh.  
“Oh Bee-Ess, you’re scaring him! And just when I was getting somewhere, too,”  
It was not just the spiky drills that made Toru scared of the Armoured Bug Man, his insect legs were the colour of blood and so was his creepy insect face and his long wavy antennae, and he had a mane of evil-looking bright purple hair.  
“Is that a…?” asked the Bug Man.  
“Uh huh,” replied the Flower Girl.  
The Bug Man cocked his head to get a better look a Toru, who crept further behind his protector.  
“You know what this means, don’t you?”  
“Urgh, it might not mean anything, he could just be lost…”  
“We need to take him back to base, it’s not safe out–”  
Toru clutched the leg tighter, making his protector interrupt.  
“I think _you_ –” she said pointedly to the scary Bug Guy, placing a calming hand on Toru’s head, “should fly away to this base or whatever, Bee-Ess, and _we_ might go for a _walk_ to go see my friend the _angel_ ,” she started talking to Toru now, “Okay little guy, does that sound good? No more scary Bee-Ess–” she interrupted herself with a little giggle, “–and you and I can have a proper chat on our walk,”  
The Armoured Bug Man flew off in a huff and Toru finally let go of the Flower Punk Girl’s leg.  
“How about we start again,” she said, crouching down to his level once more, “I’m BanchoLillymon,”  
Toru thought for a moment.  
“I’m Toru, but I’m not supposed to talk to stranger-people,”  
“Smart boy!” said Bancholilemon…? Buncholilleamon? Toru was going to stick to calling her Flower Punk Girl, “But the problem is Toru, that you’ve stumbled into a whole other world and if you don’t talk to someone, you might never speak again,”  
This was tough. He had promised Mama he would not talk to people he did not know. But he also figured that the Flower Punk Girl was not a person so he was probably okay to talk to her. She also saved him from the Armoured Bug Man.  
But then again, in his head he did keep calling her Flower Punk _Girl_ , and girls were people, so maybe he should not be talking to her.  
“I’ll talk to the angel,” he decided, “can we go to the angel now?”  
The Flower Girl smiled again and held out her hand, “Sure thing, little buddy,”  
They started walking through the forest of spindly trees together, and Toru did his best not to talk to Flower Punk Girl. Mama always said that not talking to strangers was to stop them trying to take you away, but he was going with this strange Flower Punk Girl now, so maybe that was not a great rule. Maybe a better rule might be to not listen to strangers. Then you would not get taken away with promises of meeting angels. But he trusted her, so he kept walking, holding tight to her hand.  
He trusted Mama too and that’s why he decided he would not talk to her anymore. Twice was too much already.  
Flower Punk Girl spotted the action figure in his hand and asked if she could look at it.  
He showed it to her and she said that she thought it was super cool.  
One more sentence couldn’t hurt could it? He had already spoken twice…  
“It’s okay,” she said sweetly, handing the figure back to him, “I won’t ask you any questions, so you don’t have to speak, and you can keep being be a good little boy who does what he is supposed to, okay?”  
That was a question, but he nodded anyway.  
“I don’t know if you will believe this but I think I kind of met someone who could look like that last year – well, part of me did anyway,”  
She went on to tell him all about how part of her had been one of the scariest beings in all of existence, a jaw-droppingly gorgeous woman with a can-do attitude. And how that super-cute girl – she really liked talking herself up, Toru noticed – had run into her friend, who was part of the angel they were going to see, and her friend ended up saving ‘Justimon’ which seemed to be her name for Super Astronaut Man, and one half of him turned out to be her friend’s boyfriend.  
For part of the story Toru thought that she was making things up to get him to like her, but the bit about Justimon being made up of a human and a little alien was exactly like what he had seen, and he had not told her about that, so that made him believe all the other crazy things.  
She stopped her story at the point where the part of her that was a straight-up hottie had decided to leave the rest of her friends behind, and go up into the hole in the sky with her friend that saved Justimon and defeated Winged Alien Man. She stopped there, because that was the point where she and Toru came upon a big glowy bubble of light.  
The bubble was really big, bigger than Shiba Park even, but maybe not as big as Tokyo. It was hard to tell just how big because the forest of spindly trees seemed to get thicker closer to the light  
The bubble of light heaved in and out like it was breathing, the border rushing closer to them and then slinking back away a few metres. Each time the bubble pushed outward, it seemed to get a little bit closer, and each time it came close Toru tried to look through the slightly see-through film of light to see what was on the other side, but it was too bright.  
“Are you ready to go through?”  
He nodded and took hold of her hand again.  
They stepped through the curtain of light and found themselves amongst a grove of trees with beautiful green leaves and big metal-looking trunks. Even though they were inside the bubble of light, the trees were so thick that they were mostly cloaked in darkness. But there were some gaps in the canopy and the little shafts of light that poked through gave the forest on this side of the barrier a magical shimmery quality that was much more inviting than the scary spindly tree forest outside.  
The Flower Punk Girl must have seen the look of amazement on Toru’s face.  
“This is all because of the angel Ophanimon,” she said, “when we got here it was all like that outside, but ever since we defeated Lilithmon, the evil Demon Lord that ruled this world with a velvet fist, she’s been working to make it back to like it was when we first met the other halves of ourselves here,”  
They kept walking deeper and deeper into the forest, and Flower Punk Girl kept telling Toru the story of how she, the two halves of the angel and her other friend BanchoStingmon (along with some others) had infiltrated the demon’s nasty gang, how some of them had been caught and the rescues they had had to make.  
It was all very thrilling even though he could tell she was leaving out some bits, and before Toru knew it, they had reached a giant clearing with a massive beam of light in the middle. Filling the clearing were these things that looked like round stones about half his height, all set out in circle patterns centred on the beam of light.  
As Flower Punk Girl approached the beam of light, he hung back and took a closer look at one of the big round things and found that it was more like a big round basket, like for a baby, except that it had a colourful egg in it that was as big as his head.  
Flower Punk Girl said something to the beam of light and it switched off, revealing a huge blonde-haired girl angel decked out in armour that was the colour of jade gemstones. She had a wicked-cool golden spear in her right hand, neat almost-metal wings sticking out of her back, and on her head she had a helmet made of the same material as her armour that covered her eyes and had a sort of orange ponytail sticking out of it. Like his new friend the Flower Punk Girl, the Jade Armoured Angel also had a bare tummy which seemed very strange considering all the armour she was wearing.  
Maybe it was an alien thing.  
Flower Punk Girl was having to explain herself for disrupting the Angel’s meditation, but Toru was distracted by the egg, which seemed to be wobbling inside its crib.  
With a little ‘Pop!’ the egg was replaced by a fuzzy little ball of darkness with two bright yellow eyes.  
“Bubbu?” it blurted, a little worriedly, “Bu– bubbuw…”  
Toru started to get a little worried himself. He did not want his first impression with the Angel to be that he made a ball of fuzz cry. He showed Super Astronaut Man to the ball of fuzz and started making trumpet noises with his mouth as he made his figure fly around in front of it.  
“Bubbu Ba-bubu! Bubbu Ba-buuu…” it babbled along in response, its eyes shining.  
That was better. Toru gave it his biggest smile.  
Suddenly a voice rang out from just behind him.  
“Toru Higashino,” it boomed, “have you been talking to strangers?”  
He spun around and the Angel was _right there_!  
“Uh, n-no,” he hid his figure behind his back, embarrassed, “only aliens, no strange people,” he thought for a moment about what he was doing right now, “A-are you an alien?”  
There was a quick flash of dim light, and the imposing Jade Armoured Angel was replaced by its two halves, a white cat the size of Toru with big blue eyes, green stripy gloves and little purple bits on the end of its ears, and a woman who said, like what she had done just then was no big deal, “it’s okay, I come in peace,”  
“Hikari!” he exclaimed, suddenly unapprehensive about who he was talking to. She gave him a smile, but not like the smiles he usually got from her at the salon, this one was not quite so energetic. “Since when have you been an angel?”  
Hikari’s face puffed up in an obviously fake huff, “Are you trying to say that I wasn’t an angel last time I saw you?”  
Toru was saved from having to explain himself, or fake making her feel better, by a long wail from the crib.  
The cat and the Flower Punk Girl shared a look of surprise.  
“I didn’t do anything,” Toru quickly explained, “I just looked in and the egg hatched, and I tried to keep it happy, but then I started talking to you and, and, and…”  
“That’s okay,” said Hikari, instantly calming Toru down with her words, and instantly calming the ball of fluff down with her actions, as she reached into the basket and pulled it out, “This little guy is Botamon,”  
“Ba-buu,” it said in agreement.  
“Oh, and this is my better half, Gatomon,” she said, as the cat Hikari was motioning to leapt onto the top of the basket and peered into the vacated crib. Toru followed its gaze and saw a small lump of metal in the vague shape of a fat plus sign.  
“Hikari,” the cat said, not paying Toru even a little bit of attention, “come and look at this,”  
“Huh?” she said, as she joined Toru and Gatomon, peering into the basket – and then, when she saw the lump of metal, said “Oh,” like she was disappointed.  
“What?” said Flower Punk Girl, “What’s in there?”  
Toru realised that the four of them were blocking Flower Punk Girl’s view of the thing that Botamon had been sitting on when it hatched and had probably been the reason the fluffball had started to cry.  
So Toru quickly picked up the metal thing and held it out for her to see.  
Only, as soon as he did so a burst of light shot out from the object and Botamon started to glow.  
Startled, Toru dropped the object as he stumbled backwards and tripped onto the ground with a thud. Both the flash of light and the glow from the ball of fluff disappeared as quickly as they had arrived.  
“W–what was…” he started to say before he noticed everyone staring at him, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that,”  
Hikari was the first to break out of her shock. She put Botamon on the ground and went over to pick up what Toru had dropped.  
“That’s okay,” she said as she then helped him up from the ground and dusted him off, “We weren’t worried about you,”  
She knelt down and got as close to eye level with him as she could, gently affixing the metal thing to the strap of his backpack. He felt like he was being given a medal.  
“There’s lots of things we’re going to need to tell you, Toru, and I know you’re not going to like all of it. But right now, I want you to know that I am sorry that you’ve been caught up in all this. I don’t know what Destiny is about to throw at us, but whatever it might be I know you are the bravest, fairest and most awesome-est little boy for the job,”  
Toru blushed.  
“Now,” she said, looking pointedly at the fist clenching his action figure, “let’s play some Astronauts and Aliens,”

* * *

Eventually, after what felt like an eternity of make-believe, the child tired.  
Hikari led him away to a cave just outside Priory Village – _her_ cave – and told him to rest.  
His partner, a newly evolved Wanyamon, curled up next to him on the silken bag of hay she called a mattress.  
Exhausted, the little boy yawned a thankyou to her for playing with him.  
“Makes not seeing Mama for a while not feel so bad,”  
And then he was asleep.  
“Perceptive kid,” she remarked to her Gato as she left the boy and his partner to their dreams.  
Long stretches of the last year had been spent inside each other’s heads as Ophanimon. Gatomon knew what Hikari was not saying.  
“I’ll protect him,” her Gato told her softly, “don’t keep the others waiting,”  
As Hikari made her way along the edge of the escarpment that housed her modest new home, the insectoid figure that had sent Toru scurrying behind BanchoLillymon for protection, buzzed down from the night sky to walk beside her.  
“Evening BanchoStingmon…”  
“Lady Hikari of the Holy Fusion, saviour of –”  
“Look _Bee-Ess_ ,” she scolded with a roll of her eyes, “I know I’ve told you this before, but if you insist on using these unnecessary titles you should save them for the official gatherings, not times like this when we’re alone,”  
“Sorry Hikari, it’s just been quite a while since I’ve seen you separated like this,”  
There was a lot of truth to this statement. By her own hazy calculations it had been a couple of months since she last split from her divine evolution – by far the longest period they had spent merged. But even so, it had not passed her notice that when she and her Gato were apart, BanchoStingmon tended to avoid them.  
“It’s not easy for us either,” she said, almost without realising it, “every time we split I have to remember what it’s like to be me again, what it’s like to not be _her_ , and try to forget how cold my other half’s tactical mind can be,” she paused, conscious of who she was speaking to, “Sorry, I know you’d love the option, but sometimes I think it would just be simpler if we couldn’t go back to our separate identities, and then Gato and I could move forward as one and not have to constantly re-learn what it’s like to be ourselves, or Ophanimon for that matter,”  
“At least the sight of you doesn’t send young children running,” BanchoStingmon replied.  
She put her arm around her insectoid guardian, “Toru will come around sooner than you think,” she soothed with sincerity, “You two will be thick as thieves by the end of the week,”  
She let her arm fall as they reached their destination, an opening in the rock that led to a much larger cavern than her new home. A cavern in which a table of sorts had been fashioned out of the rock, with room to fit twelve Digimon, and a couple of humans if required, around its edge.  
“Before we go in,” she said, all business now, “is the appearance of the kid the only matter up for discussion?”  
“No my lady, the scouting efforts of Agumon and the others have once again found no trace of Barbamon in this world. Biyomon and Patamon would like to put forward that we should stop searching for the Demon Lord and focus our attention on rebuilding. Veemon and Eucalyptus will likely object, and in light of BanchoLillymon and I’s discovery, I am likely to take their side,”  
Hikari thought on BanchoStingmon’s words. Until today she had been sympathetic to the calls from certain corners to accept victory and take the disappearance of the Lord of Greed to mean that it was no longer a threat. But the mere existence of Toru and his newly discovered partner had changed all that.  
It was Destiny chiding her for only doing half the job.  
“I had hoped that what we had done over the past year had ended things for good, BanchoStingmon,” she sighed, “I was beginning to think that once Gatomon and I restored the world to its former glory, we’d all be able to kick back and enjoy ourselves for a change,”  
She took a step inside the cave, unsure if she was ready to face her friends and tell them the troubling news, muttering a final dejected aside to her trusted advisor as she entered.  
“But I guess nothing ever really ends, does it?”


End file.
